i 


Ww 


liii^li   '.Myjiii-r,  III  Dutch  Guiana 


A     STAR     BOOK 


WORKING   NORTH 

FROM 

PATAGONIA 

BEING  THE  NARRATIVE  OF  A  JOURNEY 

EARNED  ON  THE  WAY,  THROUGH 

SOUTHERN  AND  EASTERN 

SOUTH  AMERICA 

By 
HARRY    A.    FRANCK 

Author  of  "a  vagabond  journey  around 

THE  WORLD,"    "VAGABONDING  DOWN 
THE  ANDES,"  etc.,  CtC. 


ILLUSTRATED    WITH    UNUSUAL    PHOTOGRAPHS 
BY   THE    AUTHOR,    WITH    A    MAP    SHOWING    THF.    ROUTE 


GARDEN    CITY    PURLISHING    COMPANY,    INC, 
GARDEN    CITY,    NEW  YORK 


Copyright,  1921,  by 
The  Century  Co. 

FEB  2  0  toQ9 


Printed  in  U.  S.  A. 


FOREWORD 

Though  it  stands  by  itself  as  a  single  entity,  the  present  volume  is 
a  continuation  and  the  conclusion  of  a  four-year  journey  through 
Latin-America,  and  a  companion-piece  to  my  "Vagabonding  Down 
the  Andes."  The  entrance  of  the  United  States  into  the  World  War 
made  it  impossible  until  the  present  time  to  continue  that  narrative 
from  the  point  where  the  story  above  mentioned  left  it ;  but  though 
several  years  have  elapsed  since  the  journey  herein  chronicled  was 
made,  the  conditions  encountered  are,  with  minor  exceptions,  those 
which  still  prevail.  South  American  society  moves  with  far  more 
inertia  than  our  own,  and  while  the  war  brought  a  certain  new- 
prosperity  to  parts  of  that  continent  and  a  tendency  to  become,  by 
force  of  necessity,  somewhat  more  self-supporting  in  industry  and 
less  dependent  upon  the  outside  world  for  most  manufactured  neces- 
sities, the  countries  herein  visited  remain  for  the  most  part  what  they 
were  when  the  journey  was  made. 

Readers  of  books  of  travel  have  been  known  to  question  the  wisdom 
of  including  foreign  words  in  the  text.  A  certain  number  of  these, 
however,  are  almost  indispensable ;  without  them  not  only  would 
there  be  a  considerable  loss  in  atmosphere,  but  often  only  laborious 
circumlocutions  could  take  their  place.  Every  foreign  word  in  this 
volume  has  been  included  for  one  of  three  reasons,  because  there  is 
no  English  equivalent ;  because  the  nearest  English  word  would  be 
at  best  a  poor  translation ;  or  because  the  foreign  word  is  of  intrinsic 
interest,  for  its  origin,  its  musical  cadence,  picturesqueness,  concise- 
ness, or  for  some  similar  cause.  In  every  case  its  meaning  has  been 
given  at  least  the  first  time  it  is  introduced ;  the  pronunciation  requires 
little  more  than  giving  the  Latin  value  to  vowels  and  enunciating 
every  letter ;  and  the  slight  trouble  of  articulating  such  terms  correctly 
instead  of  slurring  over  them  cannot  but  add  to  the  rhythm,  as  well 
as  to  the  understanding,  of  those  sentences  in  which  they  occur. 

H.\RRY  A.  Franck. 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PACE 

I    The  South  American  Metropolis 3 

II     On  the  Streets  of  Buenos  Aires 24 

III  Far  and  Wide  on  the  Argentine  Pampas 38 

IV  Over  the  Andes  to  Chile 64 

V    Chilean  Landscapes 82 

VI     Healthy  Little  Uruguay 11 1 

VII     Bumping  Up  to  Rio 138 

VIII    At  Large  in  Rio  de  Janeiro 173 

IX     Brazil  Past  and  Present 193 

X     Manners  AND  Customs  OF  the  Cariocas 215 

XI     Stranded  in  Rio 242 

XII     A  Showman  in  Brazil 27c 

XIII  Adventures  of  an  Advance  Agent 295 

XIV  Wandering  in  Minas  Geraes 315 

XV     Northward  to  Bahia 342 

XVI     Easternmost  America 372 

XVII    Thirsty  North  Brazil 399 

XVI7I    Taking  Edison  to  the  Amazon 430 

XIX     Up  the  Amazon  to  British  Guiana 456 

XX     Struggling  Down  to  Georgetown 502 

XXI     Roaming  the  Three  Guianas 554 

XXII    The  Trackless  Llanos  of  Venezuela 610 


WORKING   NORTH 
FROM  PATAGONIA 


WORKING  NORTH  FROM 
PATAGONIA 

CHAPTER  I 

THE    SOUTH    AMERICAN    METROPOLIS 

IN  Buenos  Aires  I  became  what  a  local  newspaper  called  "office 
boy"  to  the  American  consul  general.  The  latter  had  turned  out 
to  be  a  vicarious  friend  of  long  standing;  his  overworked  staff  was 
sadly  in  need  of  an  American  assistant  familiar  with  Spanish,  the  one 
sent  down  from  Washington  months  before  having  been  lost  in  transit. 
Moreover,  being  a  discerning  as  well  as  a  kind-hearted  man,  the  consul 
knew  that  even  a  rolling  stone  requires  an  occasional  handful  of  moss. 
The  salary  was  sufficient  to  sustain  life  just  inside  what  another  con- 
sular protege  called  the  "pale  of  respectability,"  and  my  duties  as  "out- 
side man"  brought  me  into  daily  contact  with  all  classes  of  Portenos, 
as  natives  of  what  was  reputed  the  most  expensive  city  in  the  world 
are  known  in  their  own  habitat. 

Two  years  of  wandering  in  the  Andes  and  jungles  of  South  America 
is,  in  a  way,  the  best  possible  preparation  for  a  visit  to  the  largest  city 
south  of  the  United  States.  The  man  who  approaches  it  from  this  cor- 
ridor will  experience  to  the  full  the  astonishment  it  is  almost  certain  to 
produce  upon  an  unprepared  visitor ;  he  will  be  in  ideal  condition  to 
recognize  the  urban  artificialities  which  make  it  so  great  an  antithesis 
of  the  rural  simplicity  of  nearly  all  the  southern  continent.  Like  the 
majority  of  Americans,  I  suppose,  though  I  had  now  and  then  heard 
rumors  of  its  increase  and  improvement,  my  mental  picture  of  the 
Argentine  capital  was  as  out  of  date  as  the  spelling  "Buenos  Ayres" 
that  still  persists  among  even  the  best  of  English  and  American  author- 
ities. It  was  the  picture  hastily  sketched  by  our  school  books  of  not 
so  long  ago,  and,  except  in  the  matter  of  a  few  decades  of  time,  it 
was  essentially  a  true  one. 

A  bare  half  century  back  the  City  of  Good  Airs  had  the  appearance 
of  a  Spanish  town  of  the  Middle  Ages,  and  worse.  Though  it  faced 
the  River  Plata  at  a  point  where  it  is  more  than  thirty  miles  wide,  it 

I 


4  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

had  no  real  harbor.  Travelers  landed  from  ships  by  first  transferring 
to  rowboats  far  out  on  the  yellow-brown  horizon,  then  to  oxcarts 
driven  hub-deep  into  the  shallow,  muddy  stream.  The  streets  were 
so  innocent  of  paving  that  business  men  often  remained  at  home  lest 
they  find  it  impossible  to  extricate  themselves  from  the  quagmires 
that  masqueraded  under  the  name  of  caUcs.  Temporary  wooden 
bridgclets  were  laid  across  corners  from  one  scanty  raised  sidewalk  to 
another;  at  the  height  of  the  rainy  season  even  horsemen  were  some- 
times mired  in  the  very  heart  of  town.  Men  still  living  tell  of  a  pool 
in  the  present  bustling  Calle  Rivadavia  about  which  sentinels  had  to 
be  posted  to  keep  careless  people  and  their  horses  from  drowning  in  it. 
Municipal  lighting  was  unknown.  A  few  public-spirited  citizens  hung 
up  tallow  candles  before  their  houses ;  wealthy  residents,  obliged  to 
make  their  way  through  the  bottomless  night,  were  attended  by  menials 
carrying  lanterns.  There  were  neither  water  pipes  nor  sewers ;  each 
citizen  dug  his  own  well  beside  his  garbage  heap.  In  winter  the  one- 
story^  houses,  stretching  in  solemn  yet  disordered  array  down  the  nar- 
row, reeking  streets  and  built  for  the  most  part  of  sun-baked  mud 
bricks,  became  slimy,  clammy  dens  in  which  disease  bred  and  multi- 
plied. The  hundred  and  some  thousand  inhabitants,  mixtures  of  Span- 
ish adventurers  and  Indians  from  the  great  pampas  beyond,  had  but 
little  contact  with,  the  outside  world  and  were  correspondingly  pro- 
vincial, conservative  and  fanatical. 

Such  was  Buenos  Aires  within  the  memory  of  men  who  do  not  yet 
consider  themselves  old ;  such  it  is  still  in  the  average  imagination  of 
the  outside  world.  It  is  with  something  stronger  than  surprise,  there- 
fore, that  the  newcomer  finds  the  Argentine  capital  to-day  the  largest 
Spanish-speaking  cit)^  on  the  globe,  second  only  to  Paris  among  the 
Latin  cities  of  the  world,  equal  to  Philadelphia  in  population,  resem- 
bling Chicago  in  extent  as  well  as  in  situation,  rivahng  New  York  in 
many  of  its  metropolitan  features,  and  outdoing  every  city  of  our  land 
in  some  of  its  civic  improvements.  Personally,  I  confess  to  having 
wandered  its  endless  streets  and  gazed  upon  its  unexpected  cosmopoli- 
tan uproar  in  a  semi-dazed  condition  for  some  time  after  my  arrival. 
It  was  hard  to  believe  that  those  miles  upon  miles  of  modern  wharves, 
surrounding  artificial  basins  capable  of  accommodating  the  largest  ships 
in  existence,  backed  by  warehouses  that  measure  their  capacity  in  mil- 
lions of  tons,  were  situated  on  the  same  continent  as  medieval  Quito, 
that  the  teeming  city  behind  them  was  inhabited  by  the  same  race  that 
rules  languid  La  Paz  and  sleepy  Asuncion. 


THE  SOUTH  AMERICAN  METROPOLIS  5 

The  greatness  of  Buenos  Aires  has  been  mainly  thrust  upon  it.  Of 
all  the  cities  of  the  earth  only  Chicago  grew  up  with  more  vertigenous 
rapidity.  The  city  of  to-day  has  so  completely  outreached  the  plans  of 
its  unsuspecting  founders  that  it  is  constantly  faced  with  the  problem 
of  modifying  existing  conditions  to  meet  metropolitan  requirements. 
It  was  a  comparatively  simple  matter  to  fill  in  and  pave  the  old  quag- 
mires that  posed  as  streets ;  it  was  quite  another  thing  to  widen  them 
to  accommodate  mo'dern  traffic.  Laid  out  by  Moorish-influenced  Span- 
iards in  a  century  when  the  passing  of  two  horsemen  constituted  the 
maximum  demand  for  space,  the  streets  of  old  Buenos  Aires  are  nar- 
rower and  more  congested  than  the  tightest  of  those  at  the  lower  end 
of  Manhattan  Island.  In  most  cases  the  problem  has  been  frankly 
abandoned,  for  nothing  short  of  destroying  all  the  buildings  on  one  side 
or  the  other  of  these  medieval  passageways  could  improve  them.  The 
result  is  that  a  walk  through  what  was  the  entire  city  fifty  years  ago, 
and  which  is  now  mainly  the  business  section,  is  an  ordeal  or  an  amus- 
ing experience,  according  to  the  mood  or  the  haste  of  the  victim. 

The  Porteiio  has  made  various  bold  attacks  upon  this  problem  of 
congestion.  Nearly  thirty  years  ago  he  hewed  his  way  for  a  mile  and 
a  half  through  the  heart  of  the  old  town,  destroying  hundreds  of  build- 
ings in  his  insistence  on  more  space.  The  result  is  the  Avenida  de 
Mayo,  somewhat  resembling  the  boulevards  of  Paris  in  the  neighbor- 
hood of  the  Opera  and  stretching  from  the  already  old  and  inadequate 
Casa  Rosada,  or  presidential  palace,  to  the  new  congressional  building, 
which  resembles  and  in  some  ways  outdoes  in  majestic  beauty  our  own 
national  capitol.  But  this  chief  artery  of  down-town  travel  is,  after  all, 
of  insignificant  length  compared  with  the  mammoth  Buenos  Aires  of 
to-day,  and  the  older  flanking  street  of  Rivadavia,  once  the  principal 
highway  to  the  pampa  beyond,  cutting  the  entire  city  in  two  from  the 
waterfront  to  the  open  plains,  is  quite  incapable  of  handling  the  through 
traffic  which  refuses  to  risk  itself  in  the  constricted  calles  of  the  down- 
town labyrinth. 

Similar  heroic  treatment  has  been  applied  in  other  parts  of  the  old 
town.  Wherever  the  stroller  wanders  he  is  certain  to  come  out  often 
upon  an  open  space,  a  little  park  or  a  plaza,  which  has  been  grubbed  out 
by  the  bold  demolition  of  a  block  of  houses.  I  cannot  recall  another 
city  where  parks  are  anything  like  as  epidemic  as  they  are  in  Buenos 
Aires.  There  is  not  a  point  in  town  out  of  easy  strolling  distance  of 
one  or  more  of  them,  some  so  tiny  that  they  can  be  crossed  in  a  hop. 


6  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

skip,  and  a  jump,  the  largest,  aristocratic  Palermo,  so  large  that  one 
may  wander  for  hours  without  crossing  the  same  ground  twice. 

Buenos  Aires  is  not  a  city  of  skyscrapers.  Built  on  a  loose  soil  that 
is  quite  the  antithesis  of  the  granite  hills  of  Manhattan  Island,  with 
unlimited  opportunity  to  spread  across  the  floor-flat  plains  beyond,  it 
has  neither  the  incentive  nor  the  foundation  needed  to  push  its  way 
far  aloft.  Custom  in  this  respect  has  crystallized  into  requirement,  and 
a  city  ordinance  forbids  the  height  of  a  building  to  exceed  one  and 
one-third  the  width  of  the  street  it  faces.  The  result  is  that  while  it 
has  fewer  architectural  failures,  fewer  monstrosities  in  brick  and  stone, 
the  city  on  the  Plata  has  nothing  that  can  rival  the  epic  poems  among 
buildings  to  be  found  at  the  mouth  of  the  Hudson.  From  a  distance  it 
looks  curiously  like  one  of  our  own  large  cities  decapitated  to  an 
average  height  of  three  or  four  stories,  with  only  here  and  there  an 
ambitious  structure  peering  timidly  above  the  monotonous  general  level. 
Flat  and  drab  are  perhaps  the  two  words  which  most  fully  describe  its 
general  aspect. 

On  every  hand  the  traveled  visitor  is  reminded  of  this  or  that  othef 
great  city;  it  is  as  if  one  were  visiting  a  newly  laid  out  botanical  garden 
in  which  the  origin  of  most  of  the  plants,  taken  from  old  established 
gardens  elsewhere,  is  plainly  evident,  with  only  here  and  there  a  native 
shrub  or  a  curious  hybrid  to  emphasize  the  changed  conditions  of  soil 
and  climate.  When  one  has  noted  the  origin  of  nearly  all  its  human 
plants,  it  is  no  longer  surprising  that  Buenos  Aires  seems  more  a 
European  than  an  American  city.  Architecturally  it  most  resembles 
Paris,  with  hints  of  Madrid,  London  and  Rome  thrown  in,  not  to 
mention  certain  features  peculiarly  its  own.  This  similarity  is  the  pride 
of  the  Porteno  and  every  recognition  of  it  is  a  compliment,  for  like 
nearly  all  Latin-Americans,  he  is  most  enamored  of  French  culture. 
Not  only  is  he  accustomed  to  refer  to  his  city  as  the  "Paris  of  South 
America" — all  South  American  capitals  are  that  to  their  own  people — 
but  he  copies  more  or  less  directly  from  the  earthly  paradise  of  all  good 
argentinos.  The  artistic  sense  of  the  Latin  comes  to  his  aid  in  this 
sometimes  almost  subconscious  endeavor;  or,  if  the  individual  lacks 
this,  there  is  the  guiding  hand  of  the  community  ever  ready  to  sustain 
his  faltering  steps.  City  ordinances  not  only  forbid  the  erection  of 
structures  which  do  not  fit  into  the  general  scheme  of  a  modified  Paris, 
but  Buenos  Aires  rewards  those  who  most  successfully  carry  out  its 
conception  of  civic  improvement.     Every  year  the  building  adjudged 


THE  SOUTH  AMERICAN  METROPOLIS  7 

the  greatest  addition  to  the  city's  beauty  is  awarded  a  bronze  fagade- 
plate  and  is  relieved  for  a  decade  from  the  burden  of  taxes. 

It  would  be  unreasonable  to  expect  a  community  with  such  pride  in 
its  personal  appearance  to  permit  itself  to  be  disfigured  by  an  elevated 
railway  system.  Besides,  as  it  is  spread  evenly  over  an  immense  space 
of  flat  country,  "B.  A.'s"  transportation  problem  is  scarcely  serious 
enough  to  require  this  concession  to  civic  comfort.  Of  street-cars  in 
the  ordinary  sense  it  has  unlimited  numbers,  plying  in  every  direction ; 
all  they  lack  is  freedom  to  go  their  way  unhampered  in  the  oldest  and 
busiest  section  of  town.  Their  one  peculiarity,  to  the  American,  is 
that  they  refuse  to  be  overcrowded.  No  one  may  enter  a  tram-car 
while  its  seats  are  filled ;  nine  persons,  and  nine  only,  may  ride  on  the 
back  platform.  If  you  chance  to  be  the  tenth,  there  is  no  use  insisting 
that  you  must  ride  or  miss  an  important  engagement.  The  car  will 
refuse  to  move  as  long  as  you  remain  on  board,  and  if  there  happens 
to  be  within  call  one  of  the  spick-and-span,  Britishly  imperturbable, 
New-Yorkly  impersonal  policemen  of  Buenos  Aires,  you  will  probably 
regret  your  insistence.  It  will  be  far  better  to  accept  your  misfortune 
with  Latin  courtesy  and  hail  one  of  the  taxis  that  are  forever  scurrying 
past.  Or,  if  even  the  modest  demands  of  these  well-disciplined  public 
carriers  are  beyond  your  means,  there  is  the  ancient  and  honorable 
method  of  footing  it.  The  chances  are  that  if  your  destination  is  any- 
where within  the  congested  business  section  you  can  w^alk  to  it  and 
finish  your  errand  by  the  time  the  inexorable  street-car  would  have  set 
you  down  there. 

I  lost  no  time  in  exploring  the  luxuries  of  Buenos  Aires'  new  sub- 
May.  Only  the  year  before  the  proud  Avenida  de  Mayo  had  been 
disrupted  by  the  upheavals  throughout  its  entire  length,  and  already 
the  "Subterraneo"  operated  from  the  Plaza  de  Mayo  behind  the  Pink 
House  to  the  Plaza  Once,  two  miles  inland  and  nearly  a  fifth  of  the 
way  across  the  city.  Like  the  surface  lines  it  belongs  to  the  Tranz'ias 
Anglo-Argentina,  a  British  corporation,  the  concession  requiring  the 
company  to  pay  the  city  six  per  cent,  of  its  gross  receipts  for  fifty  years, 
at  the  end  of  which  time  the  subway  becomes  automatically  the  prop- 
erty of  the  municipality.  The  argentino  is  fully  awake  to  the  advan- 
tage and  possibility  of  driving  good  bargains  in  the  exploitation  of 
public  utilities  and  resources. 

The  descent  to  any  of  the  subway  stations  along  the  Avenue  carries 
the  mind  instantly  back  to  Manhattan.  The  underground  scent  is  the 
same,  news-stands  and  advertising  placards  are  as  inevitable ;  along  the 


»       WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

■white-tile-walled  platforms  are  ranged  even  penny-in-the-slot  scales  and 
automatic  vendors,  though  with  the  familiar  plea,  "Drop  one  cent," 
changed  to  "Echad  lo  centavos,"  which  is  significant  of  the  difference 
in  cost  of  most  small  things  in  the  chief  cities  of  North  and  South 
America.  Yet  the  subway  fare  is  a  trifle  cheaper  on  the  Plata,  being 
the  tenth  of  a  peso  normally  worth  barely  forty-three  cents.  One's  im- 
pression of  being  back  in  "Bagdad-on-the-Subway,"  however,  is  certain 
to  evaporate  by  the  time  he  steps  out  of  his  first  tren  subterraneo.  The 
Porteno  believes  in  moving  rapidly,  but  his  interpretation  of  the  word 
hurry  is  still  far  different  from  our  own.  There  are  certain  forms  of 
courtesy  which  he  will  not  cast  off  for  the  mere  matter  of  stretching 
his  twenty- four  hours  a  few  minutes  farther;  there  are  certain  racial 
traits  of  deliberate  formality  of  which  he  is  incapable  of  ridding  him- 
self. Moreover,  the  "Subterraneo"  is  British,  and  it  retains  the  dignified 
leisureliness  of  its  nationality.  One  buys  a  ticket  of  a  man  who  is 
intensely  aware  of  the  fact  that  he  is  engaged  in  a  financial  transaction ; 
at  the  gate  another  man  solemnly  punches  the  ticket  and  returns  it  to 
the  owner,  who  is  warned  both  by  placards  and  italicized  remarks  on 
the  ticket  itself  that  he  must  be  constantly  prepared  instantly  to  display 
it  to  the  inspectors  who  are  forever  stalking  through  the  cars;  where 
he  disembarks,  it  is  solemnly  gathered  by  still  another  intense  em- 
ployee, who  will  infallibly  make  the  passenger  who  has  carelessly  mis- 
laid the  valuable  document  in  question  produce  another  ten-centavo 
piece  and  witness  the  preparation  and  cancelation  of  a  billete  suplemen- 
tario  before  he  is  granted  his  freedom.  There  are  no  express  trains ; 
the  locals  are  rather  far  apart ;  they  cease  their  labors  soon  after  mid- 
night, and  do  not  begin  again  until  dawn.  On  the  other  hand,  the  cars 
are  roomy,  spotless  and  as  comfortable  as  a  club  easy-chair;  the  noisy 
ringing  of  bells  and  slamming  of  doors  by  disgruntled  guards  is  lack- 
ing; signs  to  "Prepare  yourself  to  leave  the  coach  before  arriving  at 
the  station  of  destination"  take  the  place  of  any  attempt  to  hustle  the 
crowd.  The  company  loses  no  courteous  opportunity  of  "recommend- 
ing to  the  passenger  the  greatest  rapidity  in  getting  on  or  off  the  cars, 
in  order  to  accelerate  the  public  service,"  but  mere  placards  mean 
nothing  to  the  Spanish-American  dowager  of  the  old  school,  who  is 
still  inclined  to  take  her  osculatory  and  deliberate  farewell  of  friends 
and  relatives  even  though  the  place  of  parting  be  the  open  door  of  this 
new-fangled  mode  of  transportation,  surrounded  by  inwardly  impa- 
tient, but  outwardly  courtier-like,  subway  guards  and  station  em- 
ployees. 


THE  SOUTH  AMERICAN  METROPOLIS  9 

Three  important  railway  companies  operate  five  lines  to  the  suburbs, 
and  every  evening  great  commuters'  trains,  more  palatial  than  the  aver- 
age of  those  out  of  our  own  large  cities,  rush  away  into  tlie  cool 
summer  night  with  the  majority  of  "B.  A.'s"  business  men.  It  is 
perhaps  a  misnomer  to  call  the  score  or  more  of  residence  sections 
suburbs,  for  they  are  compactly  united  into  the  one  great  city,  of  which 
they  constitute  fully  three  fourths  the  capacity.  But  each  district  bears 
its  own  name,  which  often  suggests  its  character  and  history.  Even  a 
total  stranger  might  guess  that  Belgrano  and  Flores  are  rather  ex- 
clusive dwelling-places ;  Coghlan,  Villa  Malcolm,  Villa  Mazzini,  and 
Nueva  Pompeya  recall  some  of  the  races  that  have  amalgamated  to 
form  the  modern  Portefw;  one  would  naturally  expect  to  find  the 
mimicipal  slaughter-house  and  less  pleasant  living  conditions  in  Nuevo 
Chicago.  In  these  larger  and  newer  parts  of  Buenos  Aires  tlie  broad 
streets  are  in  striking  contrast  to  the  crowded  and  narrow  ones  down 
tow'n.  Though  the  Porteno  has  inherited  the  Spaniard's  preference 
for  taking  his  front  yard  inside  the  house,  neither  the  sumptuous 
dwellings  of  the  aristocratic  north  suburbs  nor  the  more  plebeian  resi- 
dences of  the  west  and  south  have  that  shut-in  air  of  most  Latin- 
American  cities,  where  the  streets  slink  like  outcast  curs  between  long 
rows  of  scowling,  impersonal  house-walls. 

The  far-flung  limits  of  Buenos  Aires  inclose  many  market  gardens, 
and  the  land  side  of  the  city  belongs  to  the  backwoods  it  faces.  But 
the  thousands  of  makeshift  shacks  which  fringe  it  are  not  the  abode  of 
hopeless  mortals,  such  as  inhabit  the  hovels  of  less  progressive  South 
American  towns.  The  outskirt  dwellers  of  Buenos  Aires  have  the  ap- 
pearance of  people  who  are  moving  forward,  who  insist  that  another 
year  shall  find  them  enjoying  something  ipore  of  the  advantages  of 
civilization.  Indeed,  this  atmosphere  i>€rvades  the  entire  city,  bringing 
out  in  pitiless  contrast  the  social  inertia  of  the  great  Andean  region. 
There  are  fewer  slums  in  Buenos  Aires  than  in  New  York ;  the  children 
of  the  poorer  classes  are  less  oppressive  in  appearance;  beggars  are 
scarcer.  Though  there  is  squalor  enough,  the  co)nfcntUlos,  or  single- 
story  tenement-houses  of  the  larger  west-coast  cities  are  almost  un- 
known. Economic  opportunity  has  here  given  birth  to  new  hope  and 
brought  with  it  the  energy  and  productiveness  which  constitute  a  great 
people,  and  by  the  time  the  visitor  has  wandered  with  due  leisure 
through  the  vast  length  and  breadth  of  Buenos  Aires  he  is  likely  to 
conclude  that  there  the  Latin  is  coming  into  his  own  again. 

Though  it  is  not  quite  so  difficult  to  find  a  native  araentino  in  Buenos 


lo  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Aires  as  to  run  to  earth  a  genuine  American  in  New  York,  there  are 
many  evidences  that  its  growth  has  come  mainly  from  across  the  sea. 
The  city  is  not  merely  European  in  its  material  aspects,  but  in  its 
human  element.  The  newcomer  will  look  in  vain  for  any  costume  he 
cannot  find  on  the  streets  of  Paris  or  Rome;  the  wild  gaiichos  from 
the  pampa,  the  beggars  on  horseback,  the  picturesque  Carmelite  monks 
and  nuns  that  troop  through  the  pages  of  "Amalia"  and  kindred  stories 
of  the  past  century  are  as  scarce  as  feather-decked  Indians  along 
Broadway.  No  city  of  our  own  land  is  more  completely  "citified"  than 
the  Argentine  capital.  Though  there  has  as  yet  been  far  less  European 
immigration  to  the  Argentine  Republic  than  to  the  United  States — a 
mere  five  miljion  who  came  to  stay  up  to  the  beginning  of  the  Great 
War — a  disproportionate  number  of  these  have  remained  in  Buenos 
Aires.  Fully  half  the  population  of  the  city  is  foreign  born,  with 
Italians  in  the  majority.  The  long-drawn  vowels  and  doubled  con- 
sonants of  Italian  speech  are  certain  to  be  heard  in  every  block,  though 
more  often  as  a  foreign  accent  in  the  local  tongue  than  in  the  native 
dialect  of  the  speaker.  For  the  Italian  fits  more  snugly  into  his  en- 
vironment in  the  Argentine  than  in  the  United  States.  He  finds  a 
language  nearly  enough  like  his  own  to  be  learned  in  a  few  weeks ; 
there  is  a  Latin  atmosphere  about  the  southern  republic,  particularly 
its  capital,  which  makes  him  feel  so  fully  at  home  that  he  is  much 
less  inclined  to  segregate  than  in  the  colder  Anglo-Saxon  North.  Add 
to  this  that  the  climate  is  more  nearly  that  of  his  homeland,  that  the 
Argentme  welcomes  him  not  merely  with  five  days'  free  hospitality  and 
transportation  to  any  part  of  the  country,  but  with  the  communal  ahrazo 
as  a  fellow-Latin  and  a  near  relative,  and  it  is  easier  to  understand  why 
ships  from  Genoa  and  Naples  are  turning  more  and  more  southward  on 
their  journey  across  the  Atlantic.  Were  it  not  for  the  reversal  of  the 
seasons  on  the  two  sides  of  the  equator,  the  Argentine  would  have  a 
still  larger  permanent  Italian  population.  But  as  it  is  summer  and 
grape-picking  time  in  the  boot-leg  peninsula  when  it  is  winter  on  the 
pampas,  large  numbers  of  Italians  flit  back  and  forth  like  migratory 
birds  from  one  han^est  to  the  other,  or  go  to  spend  the  money  earned 
■where  it  is  plentiful  in  the  place  where  it  will  buy  more. 

The  Castilian  lisp  also  stands  out  frequently  in  the  sibilant  native 
speech  of  "B.  A."  and  the  hoina  of  the  Basques  is  so  common  a  head- 
dress in  the  city  as  to  be  inconspicuous.  After  the  Spaniard  there  are 
French,  English,  and  German  residents,  decreasing  in  proportion  in 
the  order  named,  and  Americans  enough  to  form  a  champion  baseball 


THE  SOUTH  AMERICAN  METROPOLIS  ii 

team.  Jews  are  less  ubiquitous  than  in  our  own  metropolis,  but  they  are 
numerous  enough  to  support  several  synagogues  and  a  company  of 
Yiddish  players  for  a  season  of  several  weelcs,  after  which  the  Thes- 
pians find  new  clientele  in  the  larger  cities  of  the  interior. 

It  is  surprising  to  most  Americans  to  find  that  Buenos  Aires  is 
strictly  a  "white  man's  town."  The  one  negro  I  ever  saw  there  was 
posted  before  the  door  of  a  theater,  as  an  advance  attraction.  In  the 
country  as  a  whole  African  blood  is  scarcer  than  in  Canada;  while  the 
United  States  has  twelve  non-Caucasians  to  the  hundred,  the  Argentine 
has  but  five.  Nor  do  there  remain  any  visible  remnants  of  the  abori- 
gines, at  least  in  the  capital.  The  caste  of  color,  so  intricate  and 
unescapable  in  the  Andes,  is  completely  lacking.  Nor  are  the  places  of 
importance  in  its  social  structure  confined  to  those  of  Spanish  origin. 
Along  with  the  Castilian  and  Basque  names  that  figure  in  its  society 
and  big-business  columns  are  no  small  number  not  only  Italian  and 
French,  but  English.  Baltic,  and  Slavic,  some  of  them  more  or  less 
Spanicized  by  long  Argentine  residence.  As  in  Chile  there  is  a  little 
aristocracy  of  third  or  fourth  generation  Irish,  retaining  the  original 
spelling  of  their  family  names,  but  pronouncing  them  "O-co-nor," 
"Kel-yee,"  "O-bree-en"  and  the  like.  It  was  an  ordinary  experience  in 
running  consular  errands  in  Buenos  Aires  to  come  across  business  men 
with  English  or  Irish  names  who  spoke  only  Spanish,  or  men  who 
spoke  English  with  both  an  Irish  brogue  and  a  Spanish  accent  and 
accompanied  their  remarks  with  a  wealth  of  Latin  gesticulation. 

To  say  that  these  transplanted  Irish  are  active  in  local  and  national 
politics  is  to  utter  a  tautology.  Strictly  speaking,  Buenos  Aires  is 
not  self-governing;  as  a  Federal  District — the  most  populous  one  in  the 
world,  by  the  way — it  is  ruled  by  an  intendcntc  appointed  by  the  na- 
tional executive.  But  its  influence  on  the  national  life  is  more  potent 
than  that  of  Washington  and  New  York  combined;  as  it  has  more 
"influential  citizens"  and  large  property  owners  than  all  the  rest  of  the 
republic,  it  has  roundabout  ways  of  imposing  its  own  will  upon  itself. 
Not  that  those  ways  are  devious  in  the  cynical  sense.  It  is  something 
of  a  traditional  hobby  among  the  heads  of  aristocratic  old  families, 
most  of  them  with  ample  wealth,  to  accept  municipal  office  and  to  seek 
public  approval  in  it  out  of  family  pride,  and  their  privilege  to  be  free 
from  the  handicap  of  listening  to  every  whim  of  an  ignorant  electorate. 
Thus  Buenos  Aires  enjoys  the  distinction  among  large  cities  of  the 
western  hemisphere  of  being  for  the  most  part  rather  well  governed. 
On  the  whole,  perhaps  a  larger  percentage  of  public  funds  are  actually 


12  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

and  advantageously  spent  in  municipal  improvement  than  in  the  case  of 
most  "self-governing"  cities.  Besides,  it  is  one  of  the  distinctions  be- 
tween North  and  South  America  that  while  the  cry  of  "graft"  is  more 
frequent  in  our  municipal  than  in  our  national  affairs,  our  neighbors 
to  the  south  seem  more  capable  of  handling  a  city  than  a  nation. 

It  is  as  easy  to  become  a  citizen  in  the  Argentine  as  in  the  United 
States,  but  it  is  not  quite  so  easy  to  remain  one.  The  duties  of  citizen- 
ship are  more  nearly  those  of  continental  Europe  than  of  the  free  and 
easy  Anglo-Saxon  type.  There  is  compulsory  military  service,  for 
instance.  In  theory  every  male  citizen  must  enter  the  army  or  navy 
for  two  years  when  he  reaches  maturity ;  practically  there  is  by  no 
means  room  for  all  in  the  armed  force  which  the  Argentine  considers 
it  necessary  to  maintain.  Hence  the  requirement  reduces  itself  to  the 
necessity  of  drawing  lots,  and  of  serving  if  designated  by  the  finger  of 
fate.  This  is  no  new  and  temporary  whim  in  the  Argentine,  but  was 
already  in  force  long  before  the  European  war.  The  argentino,  how- 
ever, goes  his  models  of  the  Old  World  one  or  two  better.  The  man 
who  does  not  serve,  either  for  physical  or  lucky  reasons,  pays  a  yearly 
tax  toward  the  support  of  the  force  from  which  he  has  been  spared. 
As  in  continental  Europe,  every  citizen  must  have  a  booklet  of  identity, 
issued  by  the  police  and  duplicated  in  the  public  archives.  This  docu- 
ment is  so  essential  that,  though  I  spent  less  than  three  months  in  the 
country,  I  found  it  advantageous  to  apply  for  one,  that  is,  the  simpler 
cedula  de  identidad  for  non-citizens.  The  temporary  resident,  and 
even  the  citizen,  may  "get  by"  for  a  time  without  this  little  volume,  but 
the  day  is  almost  sure  to  come  when  he  will  regret  its  absence.  Of  two 
men  whose  public  altercation  chances  to  attract  the  attention  of  the 
police,  the  one  who  can  produce  his  libreto  is  far  less  likely  to  be  jailed 
than  the  one  who  cannot.  The  chauffeur  who  has  an  accident,  the  man 
who  is  overtaken  by  any  of  the  mishaps  which  call  one's  existence  to 
the  notice  of  the  public  authorities,  is  much  better  off  if  he  has  been 
legally  registered.  Moreover,  the  citizen  can  neither  vote  nor  exercise 
any  of  his  formal  rights  of  citizenship  without  displaying  his  booklet. 
It  contains  the  photograph,  a  brief  verified  biography,  the  signature, 
and  the  thumb-print  of  the  holder.  The  argentinos  have  carried  the  use 
of  finger-prints  further  than  perhaps  any  other  nation.  Even  school 
children  taking  formal  examinations  must  often  decorate  their  papers 
with  a  thumb-print.  Both  photograph  and  cedula  are  produced  by  a 
well-trained  public  staff  in  well-arranged  public  offices,  in  which  prints 
of  all  the  applicant's  fingers  are  filed  away  under  the  number  inscribed 


THE  SOUTH  AMERICAN  METROPOLIS  13 

on  his  lihrcto,  and  where  courteous  attendants  brin^  him  into  contact 
with  the  lavatory  faciUties  which  he  requires  before  again  displaying 
his  hands  to  a  pulchritudinous  public.  In  addition  to  tlie  essentials 
contained  in  all  booklets,  tliat  of  the  citizen  has  several  extra  pages  on 
which  may  be  inscribed  from  time  to  time  his  military  and  civic  record. 

But  to  come  to  the  polls,  now  that  we  are  armed  with  the  document 
indispensable  to  any  participation  in  an  election.  A  new  election  law 
had  recently  been  passed,  one  so  well  designed  to  express  the  real  will 
of  the  people  that  pessimists  were  already  prophesying  its  attempted 
repeal  by  the  oligarchy  of  wealthy  property  owners,  from  whom  it 
would  wrest  the  control  of  government.  As  in  most  Latin- American 
countries,  Sunday  was  the  day  chosen  for  the  casting  of  ballots.  About 
each  polling-place,  most  of  which  were  in  sumptuous  public  buildings, 
rather  than  in  barbershops  and  second-hand  shoe  stores,  were  a  few 
of  Buenos  Aires'  immaculate,  imperturbable  policemen  and  the  three 
or  four  officials  in  charge.  Otherwise  there  was  little  animation  in  the 
vicinity.  The  new  election  law  forbids  voters  to  approach  the  polls  "in 
groups,"  and  makes  electioneering  or  loitering  within  a  certain  con- 
siderable distance  of  the  booths  penal  offenses.  Glancing  cautiously 
about  him,  therefore,  to  make  sure  that  he  was  not  a  group,  the  Portefw 
stealthily  yet  briskly  stepped  forward  to  do  his  civic  duty.  The  officials 
rose  to  greet  him  with  dignified  courtesy,  and  requested  permission  to 
peruse  his  booklet.  This  being  found  in  order,  his  military  service 
honorably  completed,  or  his  military  tax  paid,  they  permitted  him  to 
cast  his  ballot,  at  the  same  time  recording  that  act  on  the  proper  line 
of  his  libreto.  This  latter  formality  is  of  such  importance  that  the 
voter  himself  would  protest  against  its  inadvertent  omission.  For  the 
new  law  in  the  Argentine  requires  each  citizen  to  vote.  Unless  he  can 
show  unquestionable  proof  that  he  was  seriously  ill  or  unavoidably 
absent  from  his  home  district  on  election  day,  the  citizen  whose  lihrcto 
does  not  show,  at  the  next  revision  by  authority,  the  mark  of  the  elec- 
tion board  is  subject  to  a  fine. 

The  most  cynical  of  observers  could  scarcely  have  suspected  any 
"crookedness"  in  the  election  as  it  was  carried  out  that  day  in  Buenos 
Aires.  Outside  the  capital  things  were  perhaps  a  trifle  less  ideal;  at 
least  tales  of  strife  drifted  in  for  some  time  afterward  from  the  remote 
pro\nnces,  where  the  familiar  old  South  American  experience  of 
seeing  the  cacique,  the  hereditary  "boss,"  impose  his  will  with  a  heavy 
and  sometimes  a  bloody  hand  was  still  repeated.  But  there  was  con- 
siderable evidence  that  the  entire  country  is  improving  in  this  respect. 


14  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Those  who  He  awake  nights  worrying  about  the  future  development  of 
foreign  lands  need  not  lose  much  sleep  over  the  Argentine,  for  here  at 
least  is  one  South  American  country  unquestionably  able  to  work  out 
its  own  destiny. 

The  argcnti}io  is  in  no  such  breathless  haste  as  the  American  to  know 
the  result  of  his  elections.  The  newspapers  of  the  following  morning 
carried  many  columns  of  comment  on  the  aspect  of  the  capital  and  the 
principal  towns  of  the  provinces  under  the  new  law,  but  not  a  hint  of 
the  future  make-up  of  the  legislative  body.  Weeks  later  the  retiring 
congress  met  in  their  new  palace,  and  laboriously  fell  to  counting  the 
ballots  from  all  the  republic,  announcing  the  results  piecemeal  from 
day  to  day,  and  causing  the  votes  to  be  publicly  burned  in  a  corner  of 
the  still  unfinished  grounds  when  the  count  had  been  verified. 

It  goes  without  saying,  since  military  service  is  one  of  the  duties  of 
citizenship,  that  Argentine  women  do  not  vote.  In  fact,  there  is  almost 
no  evidence  of  a  desire  on  their  part  to  do  so.  A  very  small  group  of 
siifragistas  did  make  a  demonstration  in  the  capital  on  election  day, 
sending  through  the  streets  an  automobile  decorated  with  banners, 
flowers,  and  femininity.  But  as  the  four  young  ladies  in  the  tonneau 
were  both  comely  and  exquisitely  dressed,  the  apathetic  by-standers 
took  the  attitude  of  considering  them  rather  as  exhibits  in  national 
beauty  and  charm  than  for  what  they  purported  to  be — all,  that  is, 
except  the  police,  who  ungallantly  took  the  group  into  custody  for 
violating  the  new  law  against  electioneering  on  the  day  of  balloting. 

Perhaps  the  greatest  personal  surprise  which  befell  me  during  the 
election  was  to  be  asked  by  a  policeman  at  one  of  the  polls  before  which 
I  illegally  loitered  for  a  moment  whether  I  desired  to  vote.  One  is  so 
palpably,  so  noticeably  a  "gringo"  in  other  Latin-American  countries 
that  it  had  never  occurred  to  me  that  I  might  be  taken  for  a  citizen  in 
the  Argentine.  In  nearly  all  the  rest  of  South  America  the  foreign 
resident  remains  an  estranjero  all  his  days;  even  his  native-born  chil- 
dren are  apt  to  be  called  "hijo  de  ingles,  de  italiano,  de  alemdn" ;  in  the 
Argentine  he  is  soon  accepted  as  one  of  the  cosmopolitan  race  of  the 
Silvery  Republic.  The  Argentine,  and  perhaps  Uruguay,  seems  to  be 
the  only  country  south  of  our  Rio  Grande  capable  of  giving  the  immi- 
grant an  entirely  new  deal  in  the  game  of  life  and  of  completely  ab- 
sorbing him  into  the  body  politic,  at  least  by  the  second  generation. 
The  sons  of  Englishmen,  Frenchmen,  and  Italians  who  took  up  their 
residence  below  the  Plata  are  no  more  English,  French,  and  Italian 
than  they  would  be  if  their  fathers  had  come  to  the  United  States.    If 


THE  SOUTH  AMERICAN  METROPOLIS  15 

any  reference  to  their  origin  comes  up  in  conversation,  it  is  as  some- 
thing casual,  unimportant,  like  the  color  of  their  hair  and  eyes.  During 
my  stay  in  the  southern  republic  the  son  of  an  American  dentist  who 
had  established  himself  in  Buenos  Aires  a  generation  ago  lost  his  life 
in  a  foolhardy  airplane  flight  undertaken  for  the  delectation  of  a  group 
of  admiring  young  ladies,  on  the  eve  of  an  official  attempt  to  fly  over 
the  Andes.  The  temperament  which  caused  him  to  accept  such  a  chal- 
lenge under  the  circumstances  was  as  typically  Latin-American  as  were 
the  flowers,  poems,  and  street  names  which  were  heaped  upon  "our 
national  hero"  by  his  bereaved  Argentine  fellow-countrymen.  In  Peru 
or  Colombia  his  exploit  might  have  been  noted,  but  he  would  still  have 
been  an  amcricano. 

The  people  of  the  Argentine,  and  particularly  of  Buenos  Aires,  have 
much  the  same  feeling  toward  the  madre  pafria  as  the  average  Amer- 
ican has  toward  England — forgiving,  though  perhaps  still  a  bit  resent- 
ful of  the  past,  aware  of  the  common  heritage,  on  the  whole  a  trifle 
disdainful.     The  popular  term   for  a   Spaniard   in  Buenos  Aires   is 
"Gallego"    (or,  in  the  slurring  Argentine  pronunciation,  "Gajego"), 
and  the  Galician  has  stood  for  centuries  as  all  that  is  stupid,  servile,  and 
clumsy,  the  unfailing  butt  of  Spanish  drama.    The  Porteno  never  says^ 
he  speaks  Spanish,  though  his  tongue  is  as  nearly  that  of  Spain  as  ours  j 
is  that  of  England;  even  in  his  school  books  he  calls  it  the  idioina] 
nacional. 

But  the  argentino  is  still  largely  Spanish,  whether  he  admits  it  or  not ; 
he  is  distinctly  of  the  Latin  race,  for  all  the  influx  of  other  blood.  The 
types  one  sees  in  his  streets  are  those  same  temperamental  Latin- 
Americans  to  be  found  from  Mexico  to  Paraguay,  a  more  glorified 
type,  perhaps,  more  in  tune  w^ith  the  great  modern  moving  world, 
almost  wholly  free  from  non-Caucasian  mixture,  larger  and  better 
nourished,  and  with  the  ruddiness  and  vigor  of  the  temperate  zone. 
But  they  have  much  the  same  overdeveloped  pride,  the  same  dread  of 
demeaning  themselves  by  anything  suggestive  of  manual  labor.  No 
Porteno  of  standing  would  dream  of  carrying  his  own  valise  from 
station  to  tramway;  even  the  Americans  sent  down  to  set  up  harvesting 
inachinery  on  the  great  cstancias  cannot  throw  off  their  coats  and  pitch 
in,  lest  they  instantly  sink  to  the  caste  of  the  peon  in  the  eyes  of  the 
latter  as  well  as  in  those  of  the  ruling  class.  Caste  lines  are  sharper  in 
the  Argentine  than  anywhere  in  w^estern  Europe;  as  in  all  South 
America  there  is  little  or  no  "middle  class,"  few  people  of  moderate 
wealth,  tastes,  and  station  to  fill  in  the  great  gulf  between  the  day-to- 


i6  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

day  workman  and  the  powerful  landed  proprietors  who  dwell  sumptu- 
ously in  the  capital  on  the  income  from  their  vast  estates  out  on  the 
pampas,  which  they  see  far  less  often  than  the  medieval  lord  did  his 
feudal  domain. 

The  prevailing  attitude  toward  life,  including  as  it  does  an  exag- 
gerated pride  in  personal  appearance,  gives  Buenos  Aires  a  plethora  of 
labor-fearing  fops  whose  main  purpose  in  life  seems  to  be  to  establish 
the  false  impression  that  they  are  the  scions  of  aristocratic  old  families 
of  uncomputed  wealth.  Behold  one  of  these  frauds  in  his  daily  peregri- 
nation, for  he  is  too  typical  of  the  Buenos  Aires  point  of  view  to  be 
passed  over  as  a  mere  individual.  At  an  aristocratic  hour  of  the  after- 
noon he  may  be  seen  descending  the  steps  of  the  far-famed,  more  than 
ornate  Jockey  Club  (pronounced  "Shocky  Cloop"  in  the  Argentine)  in 
the  patrician  Calle  Florida.  His  faultless  black  felt  hat,  carefully 
creased  at  the  front  and  back  of  the  crown  but  full  in  the  middle,  the 
bow  of  the  band  at  the  back  of  his  head,  is  set  at  the  twenty  degree 
angle,  tilting  to  the  rear,  of  the  "last  cry"  of  fashion.  A  silk  scarf  of 
much  yet  subdued  color,  a  tan  suit  cut  low  in  front  and  retreating; 
suddenly  below,  the  two  coat  buttons  close  together,  displaying  rnucli 
silver-and*gray  waistcoat,  the  cuffed  trousers  razor-edged,  surmounting 
patent-leather  shoes  topped  by  silver-gray  spats,  one  lavendar  glove, 
with  what  may  be  a  diamond  ring  bulging  through  one  of  the  fingers,  its 
wrist  folded  back  over  the  hand  it  covers  and  in  which  its  mate  is 
carried,  completes  his  attire,  though  not  his  make-up.  A  brilliaftt 
carnation  in  the  lapel,  a  green-black  overcoat  of  camel-hair,  blanket- 
like texture,  drawn  together  behind  by  a  half-belt  fastened  to  buttons 
on  the  sides,  the  skirts  of  the  wide-spreading  variety,  thrown  with 
ostensible  carelessness  over  the  left  arm,  and  a  silver-headed  cane 
grasped  by  the  middle  at  the  latest  approved  angle,  in  the  bare  hand, 
complete  the  sartorial  picture.  On  the  chronically  disappointed  face 
cultivated  by  the  gilded  youth  of  Latin-America  there  is  an  aristocratic 
pose,  beneath  which  lurks  a  faint  hint  of  the  Bowery,  particularly  when 
its  possessor  turns  to  ogle  those  of  the  passing  ladies  who  are  ogle- 
worthy.  Arrived  in  the  street,  he  opens  with  grand  manner  a  silver 
cigarette-case  and  lights  in  the  latest  fashion  a  monogrammed  cigarette, 
summons  a  taxi  with  a  languid,  world-weary  air  by  slightly  raising  his 
cane,  steps  in  and  rides  out  of  sight  of  the  Jockey  Club,  alights,  pays 
the  sixty  centavos  fare  of  the  first  fifteen  hundred  meters — and  walks 
to  the  ten-dollar-a-month  room  he  shares  with  a  companion.  At  the 
Jockey  Club  races  hundreds  of  these  real  or  counterfeit  favorites  of 


THE  SOUTH  AMERICAN  METROPOLIS  17 

fortune  may  be  seen  on  the  hottest  days  in  those  same  lavendar  gloves 
— or  rather,  their  spotless  replica — pulling  out  little  pocket  mirrors 
every  few  minutes  to  reassure  themselves  on  their  personal  charms, 
or  attempting-  to  add  to  them  by  giving  a  new  curl  to  their  mustaches. 

Physical  exertion,  even  for  exercise  sake,  has  little  place  in  the 
scheme  of  life  of  these  dandies,  or  of  the  majority  of  youths  even  of 
the  genuinely  wealthy  and  patrician  class.  Of  late  certain  influences 
have  been  working  for  improvement  in  this  matter,  but  they  are  still 
hampered  by  the  awkwardness  of  inexperience  as  well  as  laggard 
costumhrc.  Out  at  Tigre,  a  cluster  of  islands  and  channels  some  miles 
up  the  bank  of  the  Plata,  young  men  of  the  class  that  in  the  United 
States  would  pride  themselves  on  a  certain  expertness  in  sports  may  be 
seen  rowing  about  with  the  clumsiness  and  self-eonsciousness  of  old 
maids,  their  shirts  bunched  up  under  their  suspenders,  their  bodies 
plainly  uncomfortable  in  trousers  inclined  by  the  dictates  of  fashion, 
as  well  as  by  the  unwonted  exertion,  to  climb  to  their  chests,  the  occa- 
sional young  woman  in  the  back  seat  sitting  as  stiffly  as  the  model  in  a 
corset-shop  window. 

The  feminine  sex  of  the  same  class  does  not,  of  course,  yield  to  the 
males  in  the  matter  of  personal  adornment.  At  the  races,  along  the 
shaded  drives  of  Palermo  of  an  afternoon,  above  all  in  the  narrow  Calle 
Florida  a  bit  later  in  the  day,  fashion  may  be  seen  preening  itself  in 
frank  self-admiration.  In  the  material  sense  the  Calle  Florida  is 
merely  another  of  those  inadequate  streets  of  the  old  town,  four  or 
five  blocks  back  from  the  waterfront,  and  given  over  to  the  most 
luxurious  shops, — jewelers,  modistes,  taillcurs  de  luxe.  But  Florida 
is  more  than  a  street ;  it  is  an  institution.  For  at  least  a  generation  it 
has  been  the  unofficial  gathering-place  of  the  elite,  in  so  far  as  there  can 
be  any  such  in  so  large  a  city,  taking  the  place  in  a  way  of  the  Sunday 
night  promenade  in  the  central  plaza  of  smaller  Latin-American  towns. 
Up  to  a  few  years  ago  the  carriages  drove  directly  from  the  daily 
promenade  in  Palermo  to  join  the  procession  that  crawled  t)ack  and 
forth  along  the  few  blocks  of  Florida  between  the  Avenida  de  Mayo 
and  the  Plaza  San  Martin,  the  ladies  in  them  affecting  that  air  of  lassi- 
tude which  seems  to  be  most  attractive  to  the  frankly  admiring  cavalier 
south  of  the  Rio  Grande.  But  the  day  came  wlicn  the  narrow  calle jon 
could  no  longer  contain  all  those  who  demanded  admission  to  the  daily 
parade  and  mutual  admiration  party,  and  the  intendente  solved  the 
problem  by  closing  the  street  to  vehicles  during  certain  hours  of  the 
late  afternoon.    There  is  still  a  procession  on  wheels  from  eleven  in  the 


l8  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

morning  until  noon,  given  over  particularly  to  debutantes  ostensibly 
on  shopping  tours,  though  invariably  surrounded  by  long  lines  of  gal- 
lants and  would-be  norios;  but  the  principal  daily  corso  is  now  made 
on  foot,  and  admiring  males  may  without  offense  or  conspicuousness 
pass  near  enough  in  the  throng  that  fills  the  street  from  wall  to  wall 
to  their  particular  ideal  to  catch  the  scent  of  her  favorite  perfume. 
Nor  does  that  require  undue  proximity,  for  the  most  circumspect  ladies 
of  Buenos  Aires  see  nothing  amiss  in  making  an  appeal  to  the  olfactory 
senses  which  in  other  lands  would  lead  to  unflattering  conclusions. 

The  gowns  to  be  seen  in  such  gatherings  are  said  by  authorities  on 
the  subject  to  be  no  farther  behind  Paris  than  the  time  of  fast  steamers 
between  French  ports  and  the  Plata.     To  the  bachelor  more  familiar 
with  the  backwoods  they  seem  to  be  as  thoroughly  up  to  the  minute  as 
their  wearers  are  expert  in  exhausting  every  possibility  of   human 
adornment.     Unfortunately,  many  of  the  demure,  semj-animate  ladies 
prove  on  close  inspection  to  be  not  so  beautiful  as  they  are  painted. 
Not  a  few  of  them  could  readily  pass  as  physically  good  looking, 
despite  the  bulky  noses  so  frequent  in  "B.  A."  as  to  be  almost  typical, 
were  they  satisfied  to  let  nature's  job  alone.     But  the  most  entrancing 
lady  in  the  world  would  risk  defeat  by  entering  a  beauty  contest  dis- 
guised as  a  porter  in  a  flour-mill.     There  are,  to  be  sure,  ravishing 
visions  now  and  then  in  these  Buenos  Aires  processions,  but  unpolished 
candor  forces  the  admission  that  what  to  us  at  least  is  the  refined  and 
dainty  type  is  conspicuous  by  its  rarity.     It  is  a  standing  observation 
of  critical  foreign  visitors  that  the  decollete  gowns  seen  at  the  Colon 
during  the  opera  season  often   disclose   cable-like   shoulder  muscles 
bequeathed  by  recent  ancestors  who  carried  loads  on  their  heads.   That 
to  me  is  one  of  the  promising  signs  in  Buenos  Aires,  a  proof  that  the 
new  "aristocracy"  is  near  enough  the  laboring  generations  which  built 
it  up  not  to  have  lost  its  muscle  and  its  energy ;  it  helps  to  explain  the 
youthful  enthusiasm  of  the  Argentine,   similar  to  our  own  and  so 
unlike  the  blase  hopelessness  of  much  of  South  America.     For  the 
southern  republic  is  as  truly  the  land  of  opportunity  as  is  our  own, 
inferior  perhaps  only  in  extent  and  resources.     Along  with  the  fops 
lounging  in  the  Jockey  Club  it  has  many  such  types  as  Mihanovitsch, 
arriving  half  a  century  ago  with  no  other  possessions  than  the  porter's 
rope  over  his  shoulder  and  retiring  recently  from  the  active  ownership 
of  the  largest  steamship  company  south  of  the  United  States,  with 
palatial  steamers  plying  wherever  Argentine  waters  are  navigable. 
The  gaudy  ostentation  of  this  nouvcau  riche  city  of  Latin-Iberian 


THE  SOUTH  AMERICAN  METROPOLIS  19 

origin  is  nowhere  seen  to  better  advantage  than  at  the  Recoleta,  the 
principal  cemetery.  This  is  a  crowded  cement  city  within  a  stone  wall, 
as  much  a  promenade  and  show-ground  as  a  last  resting-place.  Men 
sit  smoking  and  gossiping  on  the  tombs ;  women  take  in  one  another's 
gowns  with  critical  eye  as  they  turkey-walk  along  the  narrow  cement 
streets  between  the  innumerable  family  vaults.  The  tombs  are  built 
with  the  all  too  evident  purpose  of  showing  that  one's  dead  are,  or  at 
least  were  in  life,  of  more  importance  in  the  world  than  those  of  one's 
neighbors.  They  have  four  or  more  stories  below  ground,  with  shelves 
or  pigeon-holes  for  several  coffins  on  each  "floor,"  and  marble  steps 
leading  down  to  them.  On  the  upper  or  ground  floor,  usually  sur- 
rounded by  elaborate  statues  sculptured  in  white  stone,  are  ostentatious 
chapels  with  plate-glass  doors,  locked  with  the  latest  American  safety 
locks.  Everywhere  reigns  a  gaudy  luxury  wholly  out  of  place  in  a  city 
of  the  dead.  The  self-respecting  corpse  must  feel  as  if  he  had  been  set 
up  in  a  museum  instead  of  being  disposed  of  in  a  sanitary  and  incon- 
spicuous manner.  Here  and  there  a  tomb  bears  the  sign  "For  Sale," 
with  the  name  of  the  authorized  real  estate  dealer  under  it.  The  seller, 
who  in  some  cases  seems  to  have  tossed  out  the  bones  of  his  forgotten 
ancestors  in  the  convenient  old  Spanish  way,  is  certain  to  benefit  finan- 
cially from  the  transaction,  for  the  Recoleta  is  the  cemetery  of  Buenos 
Aires,  absolutely  limited  in  space  now  by  the  city  that  has  grown  up 
about  it,  and  accommodations  in  it  are  as  eagerly  sought  as  boxes  at  the 
opera  or  seats  on  the  stock  exchange. 

"Le  cheval  est  la  plus  noble  conquete  que  I'homme  ait  jamais  fait," 
runs  an  inscription,  from  Buflfon,  over  the  portals  of  the  far-famed 
race-track  in  Palermo,  which,  from  the  intellectual  heights  of  the 
Jockey  Club,  is  no  doubt  true.  It  suggests,  however,  an  attempt  on  the 
part  of  the  argcntinos  to  deceive  themselves  into  believing  that  they 
attend  the  races  in  such  hordes  every  Thursday  and  Sunday  because 
of  their  love  of  horses,  rather  than  to  indulge  their  genuinely  Spanish 
infatuation  for  gambling.  This  same  hint  of  hypocrisy,  of  kow-towing 
to  Mrs.  Grundy,  which  is  ordmarily  little  in  evidence  in  the  Latin- 
American  character,  also  smirks  from  the  tickets  of  the  lottery  main- 
tained by  the  Federal  Government,  which  calls  itself  the  "Loteria  de 
Bcneficcncia  Nacional."  How  widespread  is  this  Iberian  desire  to  get 
something  for  nothing  is  shown  by  the  fact  that  the  Argentine  not  only 
maintains  the  national  lottery,  with  regular  drawings  every  ten  days 
and  frequent  special  drawings  with  enormous  prizes,  but  two  other 


20 


WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 


official  games  of  chance,  run  by  the  Provinces  o£  Buenos  Aires  and  of 
Tucuman. 

The  gambling  at  Palermo  is  on  the  pari  niutuel,  or  pooled  bets  sys- 
tem. That  is,  those  who  wish  to  place  a  wager  on  a  race — and  virtually 
ever>'one  on  the  grounds  seems  to  have  that  desire  as  often  as  a  race  is 
announced — crowd  their  way  to  one  of  the  many  windows,  and  pur- 
chase as  many  bet -tickets  as  incHnation  or  the  state  of  their  pocketbooks 
suggests.  These  tickets  are  of  two  kinds, — Ganador  (Winner)  and 
Place.  All  money  wagered  on  that  race  is  pooled,  the  Jockey  Club,  to 
which  the  whole  establishment  belongs,  skimming  off  ten  per  cent,  for 
itself  and  distributing  the  rest  among  those  holding  winning  tickets. 
Thus  when  a  favorite  wins  there  are  so  many  players  to  share  the 
returns  that  one  often  gets  little  more  than  his  money  back.  There  are 
none  of  those  hundred-to-one  chances  to  make  the  excitement  of  large 
hopes  worth  the  risk  of  a  small  loss.  Now  and  again  an  "outsider" 
wins  at  Palermo,  but  it  is  a  far  more  common  experience  to  wager  two 
pesos,  to  see  one's  choice  come  in  a  neck  or  a  length  ahead  of  the 
entire  field — and  to  be  paid  two  pesos  and  ten  centavos  at  the  booking 
windows. 

The  Port^nos  seem  to  get  much  entertainment  out  of  their  race^ 
track,  for  all  the  slimness  of  the  average  winnings.  The  sumptuous 
pavilion,  confined  to  the  use,  free  of  charge,  of  members  of  the  Jockey 
Club  and  their  guests,  is  always  well  patronized ;  the  adjoining  concrete 
stand,  called  the  "Paddock,"  has  its  throng  of  seven-peso  spectators 
even  on  days  when  weather  and  grounds  are  not  inviting  to  the  sport ; 
the  swarms  of  garden  variety  men  and  women  who  surrender  two  pesos 
for  the  privilege  of  jostling  one  another  in  the  other  stands  and  about 
the  betting  booths  show  an  even  less  blase  interest.  On  fine  days 
many  canopied  tea-tables  are  set  out  on  the  smooth  gravel  space  before 
the  Jockey  Club  pavilion,  and  there  may  be  seen  Porteno  fashion  at  its 
gaudiest.  The  entire  place  is  honeycombed  with  passageways  for  the 
use  of  an  army  of  officials,  contestants,  bet  sellers  and  bet  payers,  the 
latter  superhuman  in  their  facility  in  mental  arithmetic.  From  the 
upper  seats  one  may  look  off  across  three  complete  racetracks,  one 
within  the  other  and  enclosing  a  lake  and  a  small  park,  to  the  red- 
brown  Plata,  stretching  dull  and  featureless  to  the  horizon.  One  might 
moralize  and  point  out  the  burden  imposed  on  the  mass  of  the  popula- 
tion to  support  the  Jockey  Club,  perhaps  the  most  ornate  place  of  its 
kind  in  the  world,  and  surround  the  few  thousand  club  members  with 
luxurv,  could  one  overloolc  the  fact  that  if  the  average  argentino  were 


THE  SOUTH  AMERICAN  METROPOLIS  21 

denied  the  privilege  of  risking  his  money  on  the  races  or  in  the  lottery, 
he  would  find  other  ways  to  hazard  it,  if  only  by  betting  on  the  number 
of  rains  a  year  or  the  number  of  traffic  blocks  per  hour  in  the  down- 
town streets. 

Of  other  forms  of  public  entertainment  Buenos  Aires  has  its  fair 
share.  The  theater  list  for  a  given  day  numbers  twenty-five  per- 
formances, ranging  from  the  opera  to  a  circus  and  a  fronton  given 
over  to  the  Basque  game  of  pelota — this,  too,  without  counting  the 
ubiquitous  "movie."  Serious  drama  has  comparatively  little  standing, 
the  popular  taste  running  to  flippant  one-act  Spanish  carauelas  or  to 
the  maudlin  and  undress,  with  the  audiences  overwhelmingly  male. 
Vaudeville  bills  are  apt  to  be  cosmopolitan,  each  "artist"  speaking  his 
mother  tongue,  for  there  is  slight  native  "talent,"  and  an  American 
negro  doing  a  clog  dance  that  would  not  win  him  a  single  "hand"  at 
home  is  much  applauded,  since,  coming  from  abroad,  he  must  be  good. 
A  "national  company"  giving  native  plays  of  real  literary  and  histrionic 
merit  was  conspicuous  by  its  rarity. 

Night  life  in  Buenos  Aires  is  brilliant  at  least  in  the  material  sense. 
Though  there  are  fewer  blazing  advertisements  in  all  the  town  than 
along  Broadway,  municipal  lighting  is  more  generous  than  in  pre-war 
Paris.  Entertainments  rarely  begin  before  nine,  and  midnight  usually 
finds  the  streets  crowded.  By  night,  perhaps  even  more  than  by  day, 
the  visitor  is  struck  by  the  lack  of  rowdyism.  As  the  city  is  less  noisy 
than  our  own  metropolis,  thanks  to  the  absence  of  an  "L,"  among  other 
things,  so  it  is  less  "tough."  Even  the  saloons — it  seems  more  fitting 
to  call  them  by  their  local  name  of  cafe — have  little  objectionable  at- 
mosphere ;  in  them  one  may  order  "soft"  as  well  as  "hard"  drinks  with- 
out arousing  an  insinuating  look  from  the  waiter.  The  Porfeuo,  like 
the  southern  European  from  whom  he  is  mainly  descended,  is  tem- 
perate in  his  use  of  liquor,  and  he  expects  his  drinking-places  to  be  as 
gentlemanly  as  any  other  public  rendezvous.  Fully  as  numerous  as 
the  "cocktailerias,"  often  presided  over  by  expert  mixers  exiled  from 
the  United  States,  are  the  Iccherias  at  which  one  may  sit  down  at  any 
hour  of  the  day  or  evening  to  a  glass  of  the  best  of  milk  at  a  reasonable 
price. 

The  Latin-American  privilege  of  ogling  all  attractive  women  has 
not.  of  course,  been  eradicated  even  in  Buenos  Aires.  But  a  recent 
ordinance  makes  it  a  penal  offense  to  speak  to  a  woman  on  the  street 
unless  first  addressed  by  her,  and  the  few  respectable  women  who  go 
out  after  dark  without  escort  are  rarely  subjected  to  anything  worse 


22  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

than  staring,  and  perhaps  an  ostensibly  unconscious  little  whispered 
monologue  or  popular  air.  The  same  restriction  has  not,  however,  been 
placed  on  the  fair  sex,  and  cases  of  blackmail  turning  on  the  point  of 
who  spoke  first  have  not  been  unknown  in  the  municipal  courts. 

"B.  A."  is  particularly  gay  during  the  winter  season,  from  June  to 
September.  Then  "Society"  has  returned  from  Mar  del  Plata,  the 
Argentine  Atlantic  City,  or  from  the  Cordoba  hills;  the  few  wealthy 
estancieros  who  have  residences  on  their  estates  come  in  from  the 
pampa;  gilded  loafers,  opera  singers,  adventuresses  turn  up  from  the 
four  points  of  the  compass,  and  the  capital  becomes  doubly  pretentious, 
expensive,  and  crowded.  Several  times  I  came  to  it  from  jour- 
neys into  the  "camp,"  as  the  large  English-speaking  colony,  anglicizing 
the  Spanish  word  campo,  calls  the  country  outside  the  capital,  and  each 
time  I  found  it  more  breathlessly  in  pursuit  of  pleasure.  With  the 
same  latitude  as  Los  Angeles,  the  South  American  metropolis  does  not, 
of  course,  have  what  we  would  call  a  real  winter.  Only  once  within 
the  memory  of  the  present  generation  has  snow  fallen  in  sufficient 
quantity  to  cover  the  ground.  A  temperature  around  the  freezing  point 
is  the  usual  limit,  and  even  in  the  coldest  days  ©f  July  or  August  the 
sky  is  apt  to  be  brilliant  and  the  atmosphere  radiant.  The  cold,  when 
it  comes,  seems  extraordinarily  penetrating,  just  as  the  pampero,  the 
suffocating  norther  of  the  summer-time,  seems  hotter  than  anything 
the  tropics  have  to  ofifer.  His  winter  season  is  so  short  that  the  average 
argentino  makes  little  or  no  preparation  for  it,  with  the  result  that  he 
probably  suffers  more  from  cold  than  those  who  live  in  really  cold 
countries.  Both  law  and  custom  now  require  steam  heat  in  hotels  and 
the  more  important  public  buildings,  but  the  rank  and  file  rarely  come 
into  contact  with  artificial  warmth. 

A  few  years  ago  Buenos  Aires  caught  a  virulent  case  of  puritanism 
from  some  unknown  source  and  made  a  concerted  attack  on  notorious 
immorality.  The  more  vulgar  features  of  night  life  were  driven  across 
the  Riachuelo,  a  filthy  little  stream  that  bounds  the  city  and  the  federal 
district  on  the  south.  There,  beyond  the  jurisdiction  of  the  city  police 
— since  the  section  is  subject  only  to  the  laws  of  the  Province  of 
Buenos  Aires,  with  its  capital  far  away  at  La  Plata— though  still 
virtually  within  the  city  limits,  are  gathered  sailors'  recreation  houses 
and  the  most  squalid  vice.  In  Porteiio  speech  "beyond  the  Riachuelo" 
is  the  equivalent  of  "outside  the  bounds  of  decency,"  and  in  the  moral 
shambles  of  this  region  public  entertainments  reach  a  degradation 
which  is  beyond  American  imagination. 


THE  SOUTH  AMERICAN  METROPOLIS  23 

In  the  capital  itself  things  are  not  yet  morally  immaculate.  The 
argcntino  looks  upon  the  "social  evil"  rather  in  the  French  than  the 
American  manner, — as  something  unavoidable,  not  particularly  repre- 
hensible, and  to  be  regulated  rather  than  driven  under  cover.  Vice  may 
1)C  more  widely  spread  than  in  our  own  large  cities,  but  it  is  less  openly 
crude  and  vulgar,  with  more  of  the  frankness  and  at  the  same  time  of 
the  chic  naughtiness  of  the  French.  This  is  perhaps  natural,  for  not 
only  is  Paris  the  Portefio's  beloved  model,  but  probably  at  least  half 
the  women  of  this  class  come  from  France.  Many  other  nationalities 
are  represented,  but  the  rarest  of  all  are  native  women.  Whether  Ar- 
gentine girls  are  "virtuous  by  constraint,"  as  some  cynics  have  it,  or 
the  national  wealth  is  so  great  that  few  are  forced  to  resort  to  the  last 
means  of  winning  a  livelihood,  the  fact  remains  that  the  predatory 
female  of  Buenos  Aires  is  almost  certain  to  be  a  foreigner.  Yet  there 
are  few  opportunities  for  women  outside  the  home.  Typists,  clerks, 
and  the  like  are  almost  all  men ;  in  the  biggest,  and  almost  the  only, 
department  store  in  Buenos  Aires  2360  men  and  640  girls  were  em- 
ployed on  the  day  that  official  duties  caused  me  to  investigate  the  ques- 
tion. Women,  however,  are  steadily  forging  ahead  as  teachers  in  the 
numerous  and  increasingly  excellent  public  schools.  Buenos  Aires,  by 
the  way,  shows  an  illiteracy  of  barely  ten  per  cent,  for  all  its  continuous 
immigration.  It  has  given  insufficient  attention  to  the  development  of 
school  playgrounds ;  its  boys  do  not  grow  up  with  that  love  for  athletics 
which  brings  with  it  the  worship  of  good  health  and  physical  perfection 
of  the  body  that  is  so  potent  an  enemy  of  bad  habits.  Moreover,  their 
elders  treat  certain  matters  with  a  levity  both  of  speech  and  example 
which  is  not  inclined  to  reform  the  rising  male  generation.  In  the 
moral  attitude  of  the  Argentine  capital  there  is  much  that  could  ad- 
vantageously be  corrected,  but  there  are  civic  beauties  that  would  be 
the  pride  of  almost  any  city  of  our  own  land.  For  all  the  deadly  flat- 
ness of  its  site  and  its  lack  of  landscape,  it  has  a  certain  charm ;  like  all 
great  cities  it  is  cruel  and  heartless,  with  wrath-provoking  contrasts ; 
and  on  the  whole  it  is  not  particularly  lovable. 


CHAPTER  II 

ON    THE   STREETS    OF   BUENOS   AIRES 

IN  my  daily  rounds  as  "errand  boy"  I  soon  discovered  that  the 
Portefio  is  not  a  particularly  pleasant  man  with  whom  to  do  busi- 
ness- To  begin  with,  he  is  overwhelmed  with  a  sense  of  his  own 
importance,  of  that  of  his  city  as  the  greatest,  or  at  least  soon  to  be 
greatest,  city  on  the  footstool,  and  seems  constantly  burdened  with  the 
dread  of  not  succeeding  in  impressing  those  importances  upon  all  vis- 
itors. There  is  as  great  an  air  of  concentrated  self-sufficiency  in 
Buenos  Aires  as  in  New  York,  a  similar  self-complacency,  the  same 
disdainfulness  of  anything  from  the  insignificant  bit  of  backwoods 
outside  the  city  limits,  a  frank  attitude  of  disbelief  in  the  possibility  of 
ever  learning  anything  from  those  uncouth  persons  who  have  the  mis- 
fortune not  to  be  Portenos,  and  with  it  all  a  provincialism  scarcely  to 
be  equaled  off  the  Island  of  Manhattan.  But  the  Portefio  has  less 
reason  to  boast  of  efficiency  in  his  business  methods  than  has  his  proto- 
type of  the  North.  From  the  American  point  of  view  he  is  decidedly 
slow.  The  telephone,  for  instance,  has  never  been  developed  into  a 
real  aid  to  business  in  Buenos  Aires.  The  service  is  incredibly  deficient, 
not  simply  sometimes  imperfect,  but  deficient  in  the  sense  which  that 
word  has  to  those  who  have  lived  and  attempted  to  telephone  in  Paris. 
At  the  time  of  my  erranding  there  were  seven  thousand  telephone  sub- 
scribers in  Buenos  Aires — with  a  population  rapidly  approaching  two 
million ;  and  it  was  so  impossible  to  be  added  to  the  list  that  persons 
surrendering  their  instrument  had  only  to  mention  that  fact  in  the 
"Want"  columns  of  a  newspaper  to  sell  at  a  price  equal  to  the  bonus 
paid  for  an  opera  box  the  privilege  of  being  the  next  to  rent  it.  Yet 
once  the  telephone  is  in,  one's  troubles  have  only  begun.  Most  Portcrw 
business  men  prefer  to  do  without  one  and  go  in  person  to  see  their 
professional  adversaries.  In  fact  the  atrociousness  of  the  telephone 
service  was  the  chief  raison  d'etre  of  my  position  in  the  consulate. 

Having  squirmed  and  shouldered  one's  way  through  the  narrow 
human  streams  of  the  business  district  to  the  door  of  the  building 
sought,  there  begins  the  serious  problem  of  reaching  the  desired  in- 

24 


ON  THE  STREETS  OF  BUENOS  AIRES  25 

dividual.  The  elevator  service,  in  the  few  cases  where  there  is  one, 
is  on  a  par  with  the  telephone.  Nor  is  it  reassuring  to  the  timid,  for  on 
the  ground-floor  cage  there  is  almost  certain  to  be  a  conspicuous  sign 
to  the  effect  that,  "As  there  exists  a  stairway,  persons  riding  in  the 
elevator  do  so  at  their  own  peril."  Buenos  Aires  has  not  quite  shaken 
off  the  suspicion  of  a  diabolical  nature  in  all  such  new-fangled  con- 
traptions. A  man  was  killed  by  an  elevator  in  an  office  building  during 
my  days  in  the  capital;  when  I  chanced  to  pass  the  place  nearly  two 
weeks  later,  the  entire  elevator-shaft  had  been  gutted  by  municipal 
order  and  three  policemen  were  still  stationed  at  the  foot  of  it,  ap- 
parently to  prevent  anyone  from  climbing  the  shaft  instead  of  using 
the  stairway. 

Arrived  at  the  proper  floor,  you  find  yourself  face  to  face  with  the 
greatest  difficulty  of  all.  From  that  moment  you  must  wage  pitched 
battle,  for  the  inevitable  door-keepers  are  insolent  beyond  measure, 
though  sometimes  with  a  veneer  of  Latin-American-style  courtesy,  and 
so  numerous  that  to  pass  them  is  like  running  a  gantlet.  To  get  as 
far  as  the  subsecretary's  subsecretary  is  often  a  strenuous  day's  work. 
It  makes  no  difference  how  important  your  errand  may  be.  These 
stupid  Cerebuses  see  no  distinction  whatever  between  the  official 
spokesman  of  the  august  Consul  General  de  los  Estados  Unidos  de 
Norte  America  and  a  book  agent.  Nor  will  foresight  help  you.  For 
the  great  man  inside  is  invariably  behind  his  schedule,  scores  of  other 
applicants  are  sure  to  be  lined  up  in  the  anteroom,  and  though  you 
have  an  appointment  with  him  for  two,  you  are  more  likely  than  not 
to  be  still  waiting  at  four.  This  waiting  in  the  anteroom  is  so  cus- 
tomary in  the  Argentine  that  antesalar  has  become  an  accepted  verb  of 
the  idioma  nacional.  Public  officials,  from  ministers  to  the  lowest  class 
of  secretary,  have  mobs  before  their  doors  during  all  their  office  hours, 
but  instead  of  increasing  the  latter  until  they  cover  the  work  to  be  done, 
or  hurrying  things  up  in  order  to  receive  all  applicants,  they  come  late, 
fritter  away  much  of  their  time  in  non-essentials,  and  leave  early,  so 
that  most  of  the  crowd  has  the  pleasure  of  coming  again  the  next  day, 
and  the  next.  Doctors  and  dentists  are  particularly  remiss  in  this  form 
of  inefficiency.  They,  by  the  way,  charge  an  admission  fee,  that  must 
be  paid  to  the  door-keeper  before  the  patient  can  get  in,  and  which  has 
no  bearing  on  the  regular  ciiarges  "for  professional  services." 

The  reason  for  this  stagnation  in  the  anteroom  becomes  apparent 
when  you  at  last  step  across  the  magic  threshold.  The  American  busi- 
ness man  presses  a  button  as  soon  as  he  has  heard  you,  and  the  thing 


26  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

is  done  at  once ;  the  argcniino  hems  and  haws,  spends  considerable  time 
on  drawing-room  courtesies  and  formalities,  murmurs,  "Ah-er-why-si, 
sefior-er,  come  around  to-morrow  at  three,"  though  it  would  be  quite 
as  easy  to  make  his  decision  at  once.  Most  Porteno  business  men  with 
whom  I  came  in  contact  seemed  to  keep  their  minds  on  ice,  or  in  a 
safety  vault  somewhere,  and  to  require  time  to  go  and  consult  them — 
for  no  one  who  knows  the  Latin-American  can  even  suspect  that  they 
wished  to  talk  the  matter  over  with  their  wives.  The  saddest  part  of 
the  whole  story  is  that  when  you  come  around  manana  at  three,  the 
man  either  will  not  be  there  or  will  be  conferring  with  those  who  have 
appointments  from  twelve  to  one,  and  will  not  have  given  your  ques- 
tion an  instant's  thought  since  his  door  closed  behind  you. 

There  is  a  certain  English  and  German  influence  in  "B.  A."  business 
houses,  and  a  corresponding  native  influence  on  the  rather  numerous 
English  and  German  business  men  in  the  city  which  makes  them 
almost  as  prone  to  procrastination  as  the  Porteno.  Five  o'clock  tea 
is  served  in  all  offices,  including  congress  and  newspaper  rooms.  Of 
late  years  this  is  often  really  tea,  rather  than  mate,  though  black  coffee 
and  liqueurs  are  still  found  on  most  portable  sideboards.  A  British  air 
of  deliberation  pervades  the  commercial  caste,  though  the  pressure 
of  competition  and  high  cost  of  living  is  gradually  having  its  effect, 
both  in  the  increased  pace  of  business  and  the  lengthening  of  office 
hours,  which,  if  they  begin  late  and  are  broken  by  tea-time,  often  last 
until  seven  or  even  eight  in  the  evening.  "B.  A."  still  retains,  how- 
ever, a  few  of  those  features  which  visiting  Americans  below  the  Rio 
Grande  are  wont  in  their  exasperation  to  dub  "Spig."  There  is  the 
post-office,  for  instance.  It  is  as  unsafe  to  assume  common  sense  on 
the  part  of  Buenos  Aires  postal  officials  as  of  those  in  the  most  back- 
ward parts  of  South  America.  Red  tape,  indifference,  languor,  and 
stupidity  flourish  almost  as  vigorously  in  the  corrco  principal  in  the 
Casa  Rosada  as  at  the  crest  of  the  Andes.  You  will  probably  find 
your  letters  filed  under  the  name  "Esquire,"  if  your  correspondents 
affect  that  medieval  title ;  if  you  wish  to  buy  a  stamp,  the  customary 
way  is  to  go  to  one  of  the  tobacco-shops  obliged  to  keep  them,  and  buy 
it  at  a  premium.  Those  who  insist  on  getting  their  stamps  at  the  legal 
price  must  travel  long  distances  to  the  post  office  and  shove  and  jostle 
their  way  through  a  throng  of  Italians  bent  on  sending  home  a  part 
of  their  wages,  to  reach  at  last  a  wholly  inadequate  hole  in  the  wall 
behind  which  the  female  clerks  are  deeply  engrossed  in  gossip. 

There  is  a  reminder  of  some  of  our  own  overambitious  towns  in 


ON  THE  STREETS  OF  BUENOS  AIRES  2^ 

the  argentino's  eagerness  to  boost  population,  as  if  there  were  some 
virtue  in  mere  figures,  even  though  those  be  false.  The  national 
census  was  taken  during  my  sojourn  in  the  republic — all  in  a  single 
day  by  the  way,  which  was  declared  a  holiday — and  the  method  of 
computing  the  population  was  not  one  to  cause  it  to  shrink.  Long 
beforehand  walls  and  windows  were  covered  with  so  many  placards 
resembling  those  of  a  vaudeville  performance  that  the  cynical  observer 
might  easily  have  been  justified  in  supposing  that  the  printers  had  a 
special  influence  with  the  government.  On  the  day  set  not  only  was 
every  foreigner  included,  even  though  he  happened  only  to  be  spending 
a  few  hours  in  crossing  the  country,  but  orders  were  issued  to  count, 
through  the  consuls,  all  argcntinos  living  abroad  and  all  persons  of 
whatever  nationality  at  the  moment  under  the  Argentine  flag,  whether 
on  the  high  seas  or  on  steamers  far  up  the  Parana  and  Uruguay  rivers 
quite  outside  the  national  jurisdiction.  I  was  counted  at  my  hotel, 
filling  in  a  blank  under  the  eye  of  the  Italian  proprietor,  though  I  had 
only  the  day  before  returned  from  a  foreign  country  and  was  on  the 
point  of  leaving  for  another.  The  enumerators  received  ten  centavos 
for  each  person  enumerated,  which  naturally  did  not  tend  toward  a 
decrease  of  population,  that  sum  being  paid  by  the  government — 
though  it  turned  out  later  that  in  many  backwoods  districts  it  had 
also  been  collected  from  the  enumerated.  Placards  were  then  posted 
ordering  any  person  within  the  republic  who  had  not  been  counted  on 
the  date  set  to  come  to  town  and  present  himself  before  the  Census 
Commission.  These  intensive  methods  resulted  eventually  in  the  an- 
nouncement that  1,490,675  persons  were  living  in  Buenos  Aires  on 
the  day  in  question. 

If  there  chanced  to  be  no  "outside  work"  for  the  moment  to  keep 
me  scurrying  through  the  avalanche  of  taxicabs,  or  no  "office  boy" 
duties  about  the  consulate,  there  was  always  plenty  of  recreation  to  be 
found  in  watching  the  assorted  humanity  that  filed  in  and  out  of  the 
outer  office.  Now  a  penniless  sailor  would  drift  in,  to  address  the 
work-swamped  vice  consul  in  such  words  as,  "General,  I  ayn't  goin'  t* 
tell  you  no  stories,  'cause  you're  a  bright  man  an'  you'd  ketch  me  up  at 
it  an'  make  a  fool  out  o'  me.  Only,  I  took  just  that  one  drink,  general, 
just  that  one  drink,  an'  they  shanghaied  me  an'  'ere  I  am  an'  I  'as  a 
family  in  the  States,  general,  s'welp  me  Gawd,  general,  an'  what  am  I 
goin' t'  do  .  .  ."  and  so  on,  until  to  my  multitudinous  duties  was  added 
that  of  bouncer.  Or  perhaps  a  clean,  neatly  dressed  young  American, 
perpetual  outdoors  in  his  face,  would  step  up  with,  "I  come  from 


28  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Texas,  that's  where  my  paw  an'  maw  lives,  an'  I  come  down  here  to 
raise  hawgs  an'  I  thought  I'd  come  in  an'  tell  you  I  was  in  the  country 
an'  now  where  can  I  get  the  best  land  to  raise  hawgs  on  an'  .  .  ." 
another  task  for  the  overworked  "office  boy."  If  it  was  one  of  those 
rare  days  when  this  continual  procession  of  human  quandaries  was 
broken,  I  had  only  to  reach  at  random  into  the  files  to  pull  out  a 
written  one: 

Buenos  Aires,  April  25, 
To  the  Consol  of  the  U.  S.  A. 
Hox.  Sir: 

I  am  reading  now  the  news  of  the  war  (it  was  the  time  of  our  sending 
marines  to  Vera  Cruz)  and  the  call  at  the  arms  to  volunteers.  If  you  remember, 
about  7  or  8  month  ago,  I  have  writen  to  you  from  Rosario,  offering  my  blood 
for  your  Republica.  Not  answer  have  I  received  about.  Now  if  you  like  to 
take  in  consideration  this  letter,  I  wish  to  start  for  the  war  and  to  be  incor- 
■porated  in  the  volunteer's  corps.  This  is  not  a  strange  offering.  I  am  Italiaman 
and  I  cannot  to  forget  the  time  passed  in  the  U.  S.  A.  and  the  generous  heart 
of  the  Americaman  when  my  country  was  troubled  by  the  sismic  movements. 

I  live  in  New  York  six  year,  left  the  North  America  three  year  before, 
and  am  desiring  now  to  see  and  live  in  that  blessed  country.  Here  has  the 
hungry,  and  indeed  to  die  starved  in  the  streets.  I  wish  better  to  die  for  the 
North  American  states.  I  love  your  land  more  than  my  country  and  severals 
of  the  Italiamen  living  in  the  States,  believe  me,  Sir,  will  be  incorporated  for 
the  war.  I  would  to  be  at  present  in  New  York,  not  here :  I  well  know  that 
the  international  respects  forbidden  to  answer  me  about,  but  I  have  not  money 
in  this  poor  country,  and  for  that  I  can't  to  start  at  my  expenses.  If  you  like 
to  give  me  a  passage,  I  am  ready  to  start  rightaway,  and  not  body  shall  know 
my  resolution. 

Hoping  in  your  favorable  answer,  I  am  glad  to  be,       Yours  respectfully, 

Mike  Albanese. 

Nor  does  Buenos  Aires  take  a  back  seat  to  New  York  in  the  amuse- 
ment the  stroller  may  find  in  its  streets.  There  was  the  incident  of 
Easter  Sunday,  for  instance.  I  went  to  church,  but  there  was  no 
special  music,  only  a  cluster  of  priests  in  barbaricly  resplendent  robes 
going  through  some  sort  of  silent  service,  so  I  drifted  out  again. 
There  was  not  even  the  parade  of  new  spring  hats  to  which  to  look 
forward,  for  spring  was  still  far  off  in  Buenos  Aires.  In  fact,  the 
oppressive  heat  of  early  March  in  which  I  had  arrived  had  only  begun 
to  give  way  to  a  refreshing  coolness.  The  early  autumn  skies  were 
brilliant,  leaves  had  scarcely  begun  to  turn  color.  I  bought  a  copy  of 
La  Prensa,  tucked  it  under  an  arm,  and  went  strolling  lazily  up 
Rivadavia  beyond  Calle  Callao,  the  Forty-Second  street  of  "B.  A.," 
flanking  the  gleaming  new  congress  building.  Mounted  policemen  in 
rich  uniforms,  with  horsetail  helmets  and  the  white  gloves  of  holidays, 
here  and  there  decorated  the  landscape.     For  some  time  I  sauntered 


ON  THE  STREETS  OF  BUENOS  AIRES  29 

dreamily  on  at  random,  a  trifle  bored  by  the  monotony  of  life,  for  I  had 
already  been  more  than  a  month  in  Buenos  Aires  and  had  tasted  most 
of  the  excitement  it  has  to  offer. 

I  was  half  aware  of  crossing  the  broad  Plaza  Once  de  Setembro, 
still  covered  with  earth  from  the  digging  of  the  new  subway.  Finally, 
up  in  the  2700  block,  a  man  standing  on  a  corner  asked  me  if  I  could 
tell  him  where  Dr.  Martinez  lived.  I  replied  that  I  was  a  stranger  in 
those  parts.  So  was  he.  That  was  fairly  evident  to  the  naked  eye, 
for  he  was  decidedly  countrified  in  appearance  and  actions,  though  he 
was  clean  and  well  dressed.  He  had  just  come  up  from  Bahia  Blanca, 
he  said,  and  when  he  got  off  the  train  in  the  station,  he  had  met  one 
of  those  men  with  a  huascar,  a  rope,  over  one  shoulder  and  a  number 
on  his  cap — a  cfiangador,  or  porter,  I  explained — who  asked  him  if  he 
wanted  his  baggage  carried.  He  did,  and  gave  the  man  his  mdeta 
and  also  the  slip  of  paper  with  the  address  of  Dr.  Martinez  on  it. 
Then  tlie  changador  said  it  was  customary  to  pay  in  advance,  and  as 
he  had  no  change  he  gave  him  a  ten-peso  bill  and  told  him  to  bring 
back  the  small  money. 

The  poor  fellow  was  so  evidently  a  simple,  good-hearted  countryman 
who  had  never  been  in  a  large  city  before  that  I  could  not  but  admire, 
as  well  as  pity,  his  unsuspecting  nature.  Of  course  the  changador  had 
disappeared  with  the  valise,  the  ten  pesos,  and  the  address ;  and  as  the 
campesino  did  not  even  know  the  doctor's  first  name,  things  looked 
rather  dark  for  him,  for  Martinez  rivals  Smith  in  directories  and  tele- 
phone books.  Still,  it  was  no  concern  of  mine,  so  after  giving  him  my 
sympathy  and  advising  him  to  report  the  matter  to  the  police,  just  for 
form's  sake,  I  turned  to  go  on. 

Just  then  another  man  passed  us  at  a  brisk  pace  and  the  poor  coun- 
tryman appealed  to  him  for  advice.  The  newcomer  was  quite  evidently 
a  PortcJio,  a  man  under  thirty,  good-looking,  w-ith  the  frank  and  open 
countenance  one  recognizes  at  once  as  belonging  to  an  honest  man. 
His  appearance  was  that  of  a  clerk  or  small  merchant.  Knowing  the 
countryman  was  in  good  hands,  I  turned  away  again. 

But  he  called  me  back,  apparently  feeling  more  secure  with  me 
nearby.  Then  he  told  the  newcomer  of  his  hard  luck.  Naturally  the 
latter  was  as  sorry  as  I  was.  He  expressed. his  sympathy  and  started 
on,  but  the  countryman  begged  not  to  be  abandoned  in  his  trouble. 
The  newcomer  yielded  good-naturedly  to  the  whim  of  the  yokel  and  we 
fell  into  conversation. 

"You  are  English?"  remarked  the  townsman,  casually,  but  before  I 


30  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

could  answer,  the  countr}'man  said  with  an  air  of  finality,  "No,  he  is 
German,"  and  as  it  was  easier  to  let  it  go  at  that  than  to  bother  to 
correct  him,  I  nodded.  We  strolled  along  for  a  block,  puzzling  over  the 
sad  predicament  of  the  countryman.  At  length  the  Porteiio  asked 
pardon  for  butting  into  any  man's  private  affairs,  but,  "Did  this  chang- 
ador  get  away  with  any  of  your  money  in  the  grip,  too  ?" 

"Ah,  no ;  there  I  am  lucky !"  cried  the  estanciero.  "Just  before  the 
train  got  into  the  station  I  opened  the  maleta  and  took  out  this  roll  of 
billetes;  it  is  seven  thousand  pesos" — in  the  utmost  innocence  the  fel- 
low drew  out  the  roll,  large  as  a  man's  forearm,  a  hundred-peso  bill  in 
plain  sight  on  top.  I  was  about  to  protest  when  the  other  man  did  so, 
crying : 

"But,  my  dear  sir !  Do  you  know  me?  Or  do  you  know  this  gentle- 
man ?  Then  don't  you  know  better  than  to  flash  seven  thousand  pesos 
around  in  the  public  streets?  Why,  if  we  were  not  respectable  men 
we  might  tell  you  we  knew  where  this  Dr.  Martinez  lives  and  then 
lead  you  into  any  old  corner  and  give  you  a  punalado  and  .  .  ." 

"Oh,  I  can  tell  you  are  honest  men,"  replied  the  countryman,  with 
a  childlike  smile,  at  which  the  other  turned  to  me  with : 

"You  see  these  country  people  live  so  simply  and  honestly  at  home 
they  never  dream  of  the  dangers  of  the  cities." 

"Yes,"  I  replied.  Then  to  the  countryman,  "But  one  mustn't  always 
judge  people  by  their  faces,"  for  it  was  evidently  up  to  me  to  say  some- 
thing of  a  harsh  nature  to  the  simple  rustic. 

"Exactly,"  said  the  Porteiio;  "we  can  see  a  man's  face  but  not  his 
heart." 

Still  the  countryman  seemed  to  prefer  to  trust  to  his  own  judgment 
of  physiognomy  and  implored  us  to  help  him  find  this  Dr.  Martinez, 
saying  that  if  it  was  a  matter  of  giving  us  ten  or  twenty  pesos  each 
for  our  trouble  he  would  be  glad  to  do  so.  The  Porteno  forestalled 
my  protest  by  saying  v/e  were  not  that  sort  of  men  but  that  we  would 
be  glad  to  give  him  any  assistance  possible,  out  of  charity.  So  we  set 
out  along  a  side  street,  telling  the  countryman  to  walk  ahead. 

"What  do  you  think  of  that  poor  fellow?"  said  the  Porteno;  "and 
what  if  he  had  fallen  in  with  some  dishonest  shyster  instead  of  us? 
Say,  you  know  I  think  the  man  is  ill  and  .  .  . 

"Oh,  senor''  he  called  to  him,  "you  won't  think  I  am  prying  into  your 
private  affairs,  but  is  it  some  medical  matter  you  want  to  see  this  Dr. 
Martinez  about?  Because  if  it  is,  you  know  there  are  so  many  fakes 
posing  as  doctors  here  in  the  city  .  .  ." 


ON  THE  STREETS  OF  BUENOS  AIRES  31 

"No,  no ;  it  is  not  for  a  medical  matter  at  all,"  returned  the  country- 
man; "it  is  merely  a  family  affair,"  and  he  went  on  again.  But  before 
long  he  turned  back  and  to  my  astonishment  there  were  tears  visi!)le  on 
his  cheeks. 

"Gentlemen,"  he  said,  "it  is  true  I  do  not  know  you,  but  I  have  seen 
and  talked  with  you  and  I  am  sure  you  are  honest  men,  not  the  kind 
who  would  outwit  a  poor  countryman  who  knows  nothing  of  the  city 
and  its  ways.  So  I  am  going  to  tell  you  just  how  things  stand  so  you 
can  advise  me  what  to  do. 

"My  father  and  I  own  a  big  estancia  down  near  Bahia  Blanca.  We 
are  very  well-to-do — you  will  excuse  my  mentioning  that — though  we 
do  not  know  much  of  cities  and  their  ways.  Some  time  ago  a  man 
living  on  our  estancia  died.  He  was  thought  to  be  a  beggar,  but  when 
wc  came  to  disinfect  his  hut  what  was  our  surprise  to  find  inside  his 
old  mattress  seven  thousand  pesos  in  these  little  round  gringo  gold 
pieces  .  .  ." 

"Ah,  he  means  English  sovereigns,"  put  in  the  Portctio. 

"Father  was  going  to  turn  this  over  to  the  authorities,"  the  country- 
man went  on,  "but  our  lawyer  laughed  at  the  idea,  as  the  fellow  had  no 
heirs  and  the  authorities  would  only  stick  it  into  their  own  pockets. 
And  as  the  man  had  lived  and  died  on  our  estancia,  surely  no  one  was 
more  entitled  to  tlie  money  than  father.  So  he  put  it  away  in  his 
strong  boxes — though,  to  be  sure,  it  was  a  small  amount  to  us  and  we 
never  needed  it.  Well,  a  few  weeks  ago  my  poor  papa" — here  he  wiped 
away  a  tear — "was  riding  along  when  his  horse  ran  into  a  ccrco  de 
alamhre  dc  p-tias.  But  perhaps  you  city  gentlemen  do  not  know  what 
a  ccrco  dc  alambrc  dc  piias  is?" 

"Oh,  yes,"  we  both  cried,  and  the  Porfcno  added,  "it  is  that  wire 
with  sharp  points  on  it  that  you  use  out  in  the  country  to  keep  the 
cattle  or  horses  in  a  field." 

"Well,  my  poor  father  rode  into  one  of  those  fences  and  his  face 
was  so  cut  and  torn  that  it  has  a!l  turned  black  on  that  side,  and  the 
doctor  came  and  told  us  it  was  scurvy  or  cancer  or  some  of  those 
awful  diseases  with  a  long  name,  and  that  poor  papa  would  never 
get  well." 

When  he  had  blown  his  nose  the  campesino  went  on,  and  one  could 
not  help  pitying  the  poor  chap,  trying  to  hide  his  grief,  for  the  people 
of  South  America  certainly  have  much  family  affection,  especially 
those  from  the  country: 

"The  doctor  told  us  to  call  the  priest,  so  I  went  and  got  Father 


32  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Acosta,  our  old  family  padre,  who  baptized  me,  and  when  he  confessed 
fatlier,  he  found  out  about  the  seven  thousand  pesos.  Well,  he  said 
at  once  that  father  could  not  go  to  heaven  with  that  on  his  conscience. 
So  he  told  me  to  take  the  money  and  come  to  Buenos  Aires  at  once — 
for  of  course  there  is  no  hope  now  of  finding  any  of  the  beggar's  heirs 
— to  see  this  Dr.  Martinez  and,  giving  him  two  thousand  pesos  for  his 
poor  patients,  as  a  sort  of  commission,  to  have  him  take  the  other  five 
thousand  and  send  half  of  it  to  some  church  to  say  masses  for  the 
repose  of  that  poor  aviator  who  was  killed  the  other  day,  and  the  other 
half  to  some  good  hospital,  to  be  used  for  the  poor  and  those  with  bad 
hands  and  feet.  .  .  ." 

"Ah,  he  means  cripples,"  put  in  the  Porteho ;  "that's  what  we  call 
that  kind  of  poor  people  here  in  the  city,"  smiling  upon  our  simple 
companion.  Naturally  we  two  had  looked  at  each  other  frequently 
during  this  tale,  for  it  scarcely  seemed  possible  that  even  a  campesino 
from  the  utmost  pampa  could  be  so  unsophisticated.  Now,  was  it  a 
question  of  the  priest  and  this  Dr.  Martinez  being  confederates,  or  was 
the  priest  as  simple  as  the  other  yokels? 

"If  you  don't  mind  another  personal  question,"  said  the  Porteno, 
"do  you  know  this  Dr.  Martinez?" 

"Ah,  no,  but  he  has  his  name  in  the  paper,  in  La  Prensa" 

"My  dear  senor !"  gasped  the  townsman.  "Why,  don't  you  know  that 
either  I,  who  am  no  doctor,  or  this  gentleman,  whom  I  think  I  am 
right  in  saying  is  none  either,  can  pay  a  newspaper  sixty  or  eighty 
centavos  to  put  in  an  announcement  that  we  are  doctors,  or  anything 
else?  Why,  my  poor  compatriot,  a  newspaper  is  merely  a  beast  of 
burden  that  carries  anything  you  put  upon  it." 

"But,"  gasped  the  countryman,  "don't  the  editors  know  people  be- 
fore they  put  in  their  notices?" 

"Poor  simpleton,"  murmured  the  Porteno.  "Now,  I  must  be  getting 
on,  for  I  have  friends  coming  to  see  me,  but  I'll  tell  you  what  I  should 
do  in  your  case.  I  should  go  to  some  of  the  largest  and  most  respecta- 
ble commercial  houses  here  in  the  city  and  turn  this  matter  over  to 
them,  taking  their  receipt  and  .  .  ." 

"Ah,  sefiores,"  cried  the  countryman,  almost  in  tears,  "this  is  purely 
a  matter  between  my  father  and  his  conscience.  I  would  not  have  it 
become  public  under  any  circumstances;  and  besides,  my  poor  father 
is  so  sick  that  I  must  take  the  evening  train  back  to  Bahia  Blanca  at  all 
odds.    And — excuse  me,  gentlemen,  for  mentioning  it,  but  I  have  an 


ON  THE  STREETS  OF  BUENOS  AIRES  33 

infirmity — and  where  can  I  go  and  sit  down  for  a  few  minutes?  Here 
on  the  sidewalk  ?" 

"Valgame  Dios,  no !"  cried  the  Portetio,  catching  liim  by  a  sleeve, 
"not  in  the  street,  or  you  will  have  a  crowd  gathered  around  you.  I  '11 
tell  you  what  you  can  do.  Go  down  that  way  a  block  and  you  'U 
find  a  saloon.  Go  in  and  buy  a  drink  of  something  and  ask  them  where 
you  can  sit  down  to  drink  it." 

The  countryman  left  us,  and  the  Portetio  took  advantage  of  the 
opportunity  to  talk  things  over  with  me. 

"It  is  evident  that  the  simple  fellow  is  in  great  danger  of  being  done 
by  this  Dr.  Martinez,  or  somebody  else,  for  how  do  we  know  he  will 
not  take  and  keep  the  whole  seven  thousand?  Now  I  am  an  honest 
man,  and  I  believe  you  are,  too;  are  you  not?  Then  it  is  our  duty  to 
take  care  that  this  money  gets  where  it  belongs.  You  surely  must 
know  some  German  church  here  in  town  where  they  can  say  masses  for 
that  poor  aviator.  We  can  go  and  give  the  priest  twenty-five  hundred ; 
and  then  there  are  plenty  of  good  hospitals,  the  German,  the  English, 
and  so  forth,  where  they  will  accept  and  use  for  the  poor  the  other 
twenty-five  hundred.  And  then  w^e  will  not  only  have  seen  that  the 
money  goes  where  it  was  intended,  but  there  will  be  a  Undo,  a  pretty 
little  commission  of  two  thousand  pesos  to  divide  between  us.  Can  I 
depend  on  you  to  help  me  save  this  poor  fellow^  and  his  money  ?" 

I  w-as,  of  course,  considerably  surprised  at  such  a  proposition  from  a 
man  apparently  so  straightforward,  and  for  the  first  time  felt  it  my 
duty  to  stay  in  the  case  until  I  had  seen  the  money  properly  disposed 
of;  the  equivalent  of  three  thousand  dollars  was  no  sum  to  see  scat- 
tered among  sharpers.  So  I  nodded,  and  when  the  countryman  came 
back,  the  Porteno  explained  to  him : 

"Now,  my  friend,  you  do  not  know^  this  Dr.  Martinez.  How  do  we 
know  he  will  not  take  the  money  and  spend  it  on  himself,  on  dissipa- 
tion, in  short,  to  talk  plainly  between  men,  on  franccsas?" 

"Francesas?"  cried  the  countryman,  with  a  puzzled  air. 

"Yes,  on  bad  women,  on  those  wdio  sell  their  love,"  explained  the 
Porteno;  "we  call  them  francesas  here  in  the  city  because  so  many  of 
them  come  from  France." 

"Ah,  yes,  I  have  heard  there  are  such  women  in  the  cities,  poor 
things,"  said  the  farmer.  "Also,  it  is  only  too  true  that  this  doctor  may 
not  be  honest.  JJut  tell  me,  gentlemen,  what  am  I  to  do?  My  poor 
papa  dying  down  there  in  Bahia  Blanca  and "  again  the  poor  fellow 


34  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

was  weeping  and  it  was  lucky  we  were  on  a  small  side  street  behind  the 
Once  station  or  we  should  soon  have  had  a  crowd  about  us. 

"Now,  you  do  know  us,"  went  on  the  Portcrw,  "even  if  only  for  a 
short  time,  and  I  propose  that  you  turn  this  money  over  to  us,  let  us 
place  the  five  thousand  in  churches  and  hospitals  we  know  of,  and 
then  divide  the  two  thousand  between  us  as  our  commission  for  our 
trouble,  which  we  would  surely  be  as  much  entitled  to  as  Dr.  Martinez, 
whom  no  one  knows." 

To  my  astonishment  the  simple  countryman  jumped  at  the  idea, 
either  because  he  was  too  unsophisticated  to  suspect  anyone,  or  too 
anxious  to  get  back  to  his  sick  father  to  give  any  thought  to  the  possi- 
bilities of  fraud. 

"Only,  it  is  a  commission  of  two  thousand  between  you,"  he  speci- 
fied, "not  for  each." 

"Surely,  surely,  we  know  that,"  answered  the  Porteiio, 

We  continued  our  stroll  down  the  back  street.  The  countryman, 
quite  evidently  relieved  to  have  the  matter  off  his  mind,  reached  for 
the  seven  thousand  pesos.  Then  an  idea  seemed  to  strike  him,  as  if  all 
our  talk  about  the  dangers  of  the  city  had  at  last  awakened  a  bit  of 
suspicion  in  his  breast.  He  left  the  roll  in  his  pocket  and  said  smil- 
ingly ingenuously : 

"But,  senores — you  will  excuse  my  suggesting  such  a  thing — but  be- 
fore I  turn  this  seven  thousand  over  to  you — and  I  shall  place  it  in  the 
hands  of  this  gentleman"  (indicating  me)  "since  I  met  him  first,  and 
you  will  give  me  a  paper  with  your  names  saying  you  will  use  the 
money  as  my  poor  father  desires — but  just  so  I  can  say  to  him  when  I 
get  back  that  I  turned  the  commission  over  to  two  honest  gentlemen, 
who  will  carry  it  out,  I — you  will  excuse  me,  gentlemen,  I  am  sure,  if 
I  speak  frankly — I  just  want  you  to  show  me  in  some  way  that  you 
are  not  indigent  persons.  In  short — you  will  pardon  me,  senores — but 
just  so  my  poor  father  can  die  in  peace" — here  he  wiped  another  large 
tear  from  his  wind-and-sun-burned  cheek — "I  wish  to  be  able  to  tell 
him  that  you  are  persons  of  enough  wealth  so  that  you  will  not  need 
to  spend  this  money  on  yourselves,  just  some  little  proof,  gentlemen." 

"Surely,  most  just  and  wise,"  cried  the  Porteno,  "and  I  ara  certainly 
not  the  man  to  be  unwilling  to  show  you  that  I  am  a  respectable  person. 
Of  course  I  am  not  carrying  about  with  me  any  such  large  sum  as  you 
have,  but  if  it  is  a  matter  of  a  thousand  or  so  pesos,  I  never  go  about 
without  that  amount  on  my  person." 

Here  he  pulled  back  his  coat  a  bit  and  displayed  a  smaller  roll  of 


ON  THE  STREETS  OF  BUENOS  AIRES  35 

hills,  though  with  the  extreme  circumspection  of  the  city-bred  man. 
The  countryman  seemed  entirely  satisfied  with  this  proof  of  honesty 
and,  shaking  hands  with  the  other  most  heartily,  assured  him  that  he 
had  every  confidence  in  him.  Then  he  turned  his  simple  face  question- 
ingly  upon  me. 

I  could  not,  of  course,  being  a  mere  vagabonding  "errand  boy,"  make 
any  display  of  wealth.  Uut  it  seemed  so  eminently  my  duty  to  keep  an 
eye  on  the  Porteiio  until  the  countryman's  money  had  come  into  indis- 
putably honest  hands  that  I  determined  to  invent  myself  a  small  for- 
tune with  which  to  keep  my  standing  in  the  case.  I  drew  out  the  nine 
pesos  and  some  change  in  my  pocket  with  an  apologetic  countenance 
and  addressed  my  companions : 

"I  'm  sorry  not  to  be  able  to  show  at  once  that  I  am  a  person  of 
means,  but  I  am  so  well  aware  of  the  dangers  of  large  cities  that  I 
never  carry  with  me  more  than  enough  for  the  day's  expenses,  and  of 
course  you  are  not  interested  in  seeing  this  tiny  amount,"  which  I 
then  put  back  into  my  pocket. 

"But  you  must  have  money  somewhere,"  asked  the  Porteiio, 
anxiously,  "just  enough  to  show  this  gentleman  we  can  be  trusted  to 
carry  out  his  commission?  Come  over  here  a  moment.  You  will  ex- 
cuse us  for  a  minute,  won't  you?"  he  added,  addressing  the  campc- 
sino. 

"Yes,  but  sefiores,"  cried  the  latter,  almost  in  tears,  "you  are  not 
going  to  talk  about  anything  to  my  hurt?" 

"On  the  contrary,  it  is  entirely  for  your  good,"  answered  the  towns- 
man, "Just  excuse  us  a  moment  until  we  arrange  this  matter  to 
your  satisfaction." 

The  two  of  us  crossed  the  street,  where  the  Porteiio  asked  me  again 
if  I  could  not  show  I  had  money. 

"Why,  yes,"  I  lied,  determined  now  at  all  costs  not  to  let  him  take 
unfair  advantage  of  the  incredibly  simple  estancicro,  "I  have  money 
in  the — er — the  German  bank  and  in  the  German  consulate.  But  how 
can  I  get  it  out,  to-day  being  Sunday?  Of  course,  if  the  bank-book 
would  be  sufficient  proof  for  our  friend,  I  could  hurry  home  and  get 
that." 

"Where  do  you  live?" 

"Tucuman  1671." 

"Well,  now,  how  could  we  arrange?"  puzzled  the  townsman.  "You 
could  go  and  get  the  bank-book.  Or  shall  I  go  with  you?  No,  it  will 
be  better  for  me  to  stay  here  with  our  friend,  for  with  seven  thousand 


36  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

pesos  in  his  pocket,  which  anyone  might  take  away  from  him — ^but  you 
could  run  home  and  get  the  bank-book,  and  that  perhaps  would  keep 
him  interested  until  to-morrow,  when  the  banks  open — for  of  course, 
being  a  man  from  the  pampa,  he  won't  know  that  a  bank-book  is  proof 
of  having  money — and  to-morrow  you  could  get  the  money  out  and 
.  .  .  How  much  money  have  you  in  the  bank?'' 

*T  can't  say  exactly,"  I  answered,  ostensibly  cudgeling  my  brains  to 
remember,  "perhaps  a  little  over  six  thousand  pesos." 

"Ah,  that's  fine,"  said  the  Portcho,  his  eyes  shining,  "because  that, 
with  what  I  have,  will  just  about  equal  the  seven  thousand  our  friend 
has,  and  give  him  full  confidence."  We  turned  back  toward  the 
countryman. 

"Of  course,"  went  on  my  companion,  bringing  his  lips  close  to  my 
ear,  "when  we  get  that  seven  thousand — and  I  know  you  are  not  the 
sort  of  man  who  will  beat  me  out  of  my  share  just  because  it  is  going 
to  be  put  into  your  hands.  Are  you?"  When  I  shook  my  head  he 
grasped  my  hand  and  shook  it  fervently.  "When  we  get  that  seven 
thousand  it  won't  much  matter  whether  the  priest  and  the  hospital — ■ 
you  understand  me,  as  man  to  man,  don't  you  ?" 

I  gave  him  a  wise  look  as  we  rejoined  the  countryman,  who  was 
nursing  his  feet  as  if  city  pavements  were  already  blistering  them. 
When  we  told  him  that  if  he  wished  to  see  my  six  thousand — for,  as 
we  expected,  he  had  little  knowledge  of,  or  faith  in,  bank-books — 
he  would  have  to  stay  over  until  the  next  day,  he  protested,  naturally, 
that  he  must  take  the  evening  train,  his  poor  father  being  likely  to  die 
at  any  moment.  But  he  was  apparently  as  tractable  as  he  was  simple, 
for  when  it  was  all  explained  to  him,  that  I  would  go  home  at  once 
and  be  back  within  half  an  hour,  or  forty  minutes  at  the  most,  with 
my  bank-book,  that  then  we  would  all  three  spend  the  afternoon  and 
night  together  somewhere  until  the  banks  opened  in  the  morning,  he 
admitted  that  that  was  probably  the  best  way  out  of  it,  that  "papa"  al- 
ways had  had  a  strong  constitution  after  all,  that  the  money  must  be 
properly  placed  before  he  returned  home,  and  after  drawing  out  and 
looking  at  the  roll  of  seven  thousand  again  and  asking  if  we  wanted  him 
to  count  it  to  show  that  it  was  really  that  amount,  to  which  the  Porteno 
hastily  protested  and  begged  him  to  get  it  back  into  his  pocket  as  soon 
as  possible,  he  agreed  to  our  plan.  I  was  to  catch  a  car  home  at  once, 
get  my  bank-book,  and  return  to  them  on  that  same  corner. 

There  being  no  car  in  sight,  I  set  off  at  a  swift  pace  along  the  tram 
line.    As  I  looked  around  to  see  if  the  car  was  coming,  the  two  waved 


ON  THE  STREETS  OF  BUENOS  AIRES  37 

to  me  to  come  back.  I  rejoined  them,  and  the  countryman  again  begged 
me  not  to  say  a  word  to  anyone  about  the  matter,  since  it  was  entirely 
a  problem  between  his  father  and  his  conscience.  I  quieted  his  al- 
most tearful  fears  by  assuring  him  that  I  lived  all  alone,  that  I  had 
scarcely  a  friend  in  Buenos  Aires,  and  that  I  was  naturally  of  a  most 
taciturn  disposition.  As  I  turned  away  again,  the  townsman  took  a 
few  steps  after  me  and  murmured  in  my  ear,  "If  you  will  bring  along 
Aour  rings  and  jewels,  too,  that  will  help  to  win  his  confidence."  I 
assured  him  I  would  bring  every  piece  of  jewelry  I  possessed,  and 
hurried  off  once  more  down  the  street  car  line. 

A  couple  of  blocks  beyond,  where  the  street  curved  and  hid  my 
friends  from  view,  I  turned  a  corner.  A  man  who  seemed  to  have 
been  peering  out  from  behind  it  asked  me  if  I  knew  "those  two 
persons." 

"No,"  I  answered,  "we  were  merely  passing  the  time  of  day." 

"But  don't  you  know  esos  son  ladrones — those  are  thieves!"  he 
cried. 

"Senor,"  I  replied,  "my  very  best  thanks  for  your  kind  warning, 
but  I  discovered  that  about  half  an  hour  ago." 

Whereupon  I  continued  for  where  I  had  started — to  keep  an  en- 
gagement with  a  fellow-countryman  at  the  afternoon  races  in  Palermo, 
a  rendezvous  I  had  for  a  time  feared  I  should  have  to  miss  unless  I 
cut  short  my  very  entertaining  Easter  morning  with  the  bunco  steerers. 


CHAPTER  III 

FAR   AND    WIDE   ON    THE   ARGENTINE    PAMPAS 

THE  traveler  who  visits  only  Buenos  Aires  will  almost  certainly 
carry  away  a  mistaken  notion  of  the  Argentine.  There  is  per- 
haps no  national  capital  in  the  world  so  far  in  advance  of,  so 
out  of  proportion  to  its  nation  as  is  the  great  city  on  what  the  Eng- 
lish called  the  "Plate."  We  of  the  northern  hemisphere  are  not  ac- 
customed to  cities  which  are  their  countries  to  the  extent  that  Buenos 
Aires  is  the  Argentine.  American  editors  and  publicists  expressed 
astonishment,  and  in  some  cases  misgiving,  when  our  latest  census 
showed  that  one  tenth  the  population  of  the  United  States  dwells  in 
its  three  largest  cities.  Of  all  the  people  inhabiting  the  Argentine 
Republic  virtually  one  fourth  live  in  the  capital. 

The  contrast  between  this  and  the  great  background  of  pampas  is 
incredible;  Buenos  Aires  is  far  more  closely  allied  to  Paris  or  Rome 
than  to  the  broad  country  over  which  it  rules.  There  are  several  rea- 
sons for  this  disparity,  besides  the  general  South  American  tendency 
to  dress  up  the  capital  like  an  only  son  and  trust  that  the  rest  of  the 
country  will  pass  unnoticed,  like  a  flock  of  poor  relatives  or  servants. 
The  two  principal  crops  of  the  Argentine,  cattle  and  wheat,  do  not 
require  a  compact  rural  population.  Being  the  chief  port  as  well  as 
the  metropolis  and  capital,  Buenos  Aires  has  first  choice  of  those  who 
cross  the  sea  seeking  new  occupations  and  homes.  It  sucks  the  life 
blood  from  the  constant  stream  of  immigration,  leaving  the  "camp" 
a  sparsely  settled  expanse  of  boundless  plain  and  the  other  cities  mere 
provincial  towns,  sometimes  pleasant  places  to  live  in,  but  wholly  de- 
void of  metropolitan  features.  Buenos  Aires  is  as  large  as  Philadel- 
phia ;  the  second  city  of  the  Argentine  is  smaller  than  Akron,  Ohio. 

Numerous  eflforts  have  been  made  to  bring  about  a  better  balance. 
The  government  offers  the  immigrant  free  transportation  to  any  part 
of  the  country.  Down  on  the  Paseos  of  Colon  and  Julio,  beneath  the 
arcades  of  which  Spanish  and  Armenian  petty  merchants,  cheap 
Italian  restaurants,  and  den-like  second-hand  shops  make  first  appeal 
to  the  thin  purse  of  the  newly  arrived  fortune  seeker,  the  broad  brick 

its 


FAR  AND  WIDE  ON  THE  ARGENTINE  PAMPAS       39 

pillars  are  covered  with  tlie  enticements  of  employment  agencies, — 
a  cuadrilla  of  such  a  size  wanted  for  railroad  work  three  hundred  miles 
west ;  so  many  laborers  needed  on  an  cstancia  in  a  distant  province, 
free  fare,  nominal  fee — just  such  signs  as  may  be  seen  on  the  corner  of 
Madison  and  Canal  Streets  in  Chicago  and  in  a  score  of  our  western 
cities.  The  wages  offered  are  from  twenty  to  thirty  per  cent,  lower 
than  for  the  same  grade  of  labor  in  the  United  States  at  the  same 
period,  and  the  cost  of  meals  somewhat  higher.  But  it  is  something 
more  than  this  that  causes  the  majority  of  immigrants  to  pause  and 
read  and  wander  on  in  quest  of  some  occupation  financially  less  at- 
tractive in  or  near  the  capital.  Possibly  it  is  a  subconscious  dread  of 
the  horizonless  pampas  which  stretch  away  into  the  unknown  beyonrl 
the  city ;  some  attribute  it  to  the  now  happily  decreasing  autocracy 
of  grafting  rural  officials  and  the  lack  of  government  protection  in 
districts  out  of  touch  with  the  capital.  Or  it  may  be  nothing  more 
than  the  world-wide  tendency  to  congregate  in  cities.  The  fact  re- 
mains that  Buenos  Aires  is  congested  with  the  very  laborers  who  are 
sadly  needed  on  the  great  undeveloped  plains  of  the  interior. 

A  railroad  map  of  the  Argentine  is  a  striking  illustration  of  this 
concentration  of  population.  As  all  roads  once  led  to  Rome,  so  do  all 
railway  lines  of  the  Argentine  converge  upon  Buenos  Aires.  Tracks 
radiate  from  the  capital  in  every  direction  in  which  there  is  Argen- 
tine territory,  a  dense  network  which  suggests  on  a  larger  scale  the 
railroad  yards  of  our  great  centers  of  transportation.  No  other  city 
of  the  land  is  more  than  a  way  station  compared  with  the  all-absorb- 
ing capital.  There  is  probably  no  country  in  the  world  in  which  it  is 
easier  to  lay  rails,  though  it  is  sometimes  difficult  to  keep  them  above 
the  surface.  With  the  beginning  of  its  real  exploitation,  therefore, 
new  lines  sprang  up  almost  overnight.  As  in  the  United  States 
be}  ond  the  Alleghenies,  railroads  came  in  most  cases  before  highways ; 
for  though  Spaniards  settled  in  the  Argentine  four  centuries  ago,  the 
scattered  estancieros  and  their  peons  were  content  to  ride  their  horses 
across  the  open  plains,  and  the  modern  movement  is  as  yet  scarcely 
a  generation  old.  There  are  many  regions  where  the  railroad  is  to 
this  day  the  only  real  route ;  those  who  do  not  use  it  drive  or  ride  at 
will  across  the  trackless  pampas,  with  thistles  or  waving  brown  grass 
threshing  their  wheels  or  their  horses'  knees.  To-day  there  are  rail- 
ways not  only  from  Buenos  Aires  to  every  town  of  the  adjoining 
provinces,  but  to  Bolivia  and  Paraguay  on  the  north,  to  Chile  on  the 
west,  and  Patagonia  in  the  South.    Long  palatial  trains  roll  out  of  the 


40  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

capital  in  every  direction,  entire  trains  bound  for  cities  of  which  the 
average  American  has  never  heard  the  name,  the  destination  an- 
nounced by  placards  on  the  sides  of  the  cars  as  in  Europe — and  as  it 
should  be  in  the  United  States. 

With  the  exception  of  a  minor  French  line  or  two,  and  some  rather 
unimportant  government  roads  of  narrow  gauge,  all  the  railways  of 
the  Argentine  are  English,  very  English,  in  fact,  with  British  mana- 
gers and  chiefs  of  departments,  engines  without  bells,  and  with  the 
nerve-racking  screech  of  European  locomotives,  to  say  nothing  of  the 
British  "staff"  system  which  forces  even  "limited"  trains  to  slow  down 
at  every  station  enough  for  the  engineer  to  snatch  the  sort  of  iron  scep- 
ter which  is  his  authority  for  entering  another  section.  The  rolling 
stock,  however,  is  more  nearly  American  in  appearance.  The  freight 
cars  are  large,  the  passenger  coaches — of  two  classes — are  built  on  a 
modified  American  plan,  without  compartments.  Both  in  comfort  and 
speed  the  main  Argentine  lines  rival  our  own,  though  there  are  fewer 
through  expresses  which  maintain  what  we  would  call  a  high  rate 
throughout  their  runs.  For  one  thing  the  government  assesses  a 
fine  against  those  trains  which  are  more  than  a  little  late  without 
palpable  excuse,  and  it  is  natural  that  the  companies  so  arrange  their 
schedules  as  to  make  such  punishment  unlikely,  with  the  result  that 
many  trains  have  a  tendency  to  wait  at  stations  for  the  time-table  to 
catch  up  with  them.  Nor,  with  the  exception  of  the  through  lines 
to  the  neighboring  republics,  do  most  of  the  tracks  forming  that 
great  network  out  of  Buenos  Aires  fetch  up  anywhere  in  particular. 
Nearly  all  of  them  have  the  air  of  pausing  in  doubt  on  the  edge  of  the 
great  expanses  they  set  out  to  explore,  with  the  result  that  while  the 
provinces  bordering  Buenos  Aires  are  so  thickly  strewn  with  tracks 
that  the  map  suggests  there  is  not  room  to  set  down  a  foot  between 
them,  there  are  enormous  tracts  of  territory  in  the  central  and  west- 
ern portions  of  the  country  wholly  imtouched  by  modern  transporta- 
tion. Life  slows  down  on  these  many  arteries  of  travel,  too,  in  ex- 
act proportion  to  the  distance  from  the  heart  from  which  all  the 
Argentine  is  nourished.  But  there  are  indications  in  most  cases 
that  the  pause  at  nowhere  is  only  temporary,  that  presently  the  lines 
will  summon  up  breath  and  courage  to  push  on  across  the  still  track- 
less pampas. 

The  great  drawback  to  travel  in  the  Argentine  is  the  cost,  both  in 
time  and  money.  Distances  are  so  great,  places  of  any  importance  so 
far  apart,  that  while  fares  are  not  much  higher  than  in  the  United 


FAR  AND  WIDE  ON  THE  ARGENTINE  PAMPAS       41 

States,  it  takes  many  hours  and  many  pesos  to  get  anywhere  worth 
going.  Towns  which  look  but  a  cannon-shot  apart  on  the  map  may 
be  reached  only  by  several  hours  of  travel,  saddened  by  the  despair- 
ing flatness  and  monotony  of  the  desolate  pampas,  where  there  is 
rarely  a  tree  to  give  a  pleasing  touch  of  shade,  no  spot  of  green  to  at- 
tract and  rest  the  eyes,  a  landscape  as  uninviting  as  an  unfurnished 
apartment. 

In  my  double  capacity  of  consular  protege  and  prospective  "booster," 
however,  I  was  furnished  with  general  passes  by  all  the  important 
railways,  and  time  is  no  object  to  a  mere  wanderer.  But  for  this 
official  recognition  of  my  unstable  temperament  I  should  probably 
have  seen  little  of  the  Argentine,  for  even  the  man  who  has  tramped 
the  length  of  the  Andes  would  scarcely  have  the  patience  to  face  on 
foot  the  endless  horizon  of  the  pampas ;  and  "hoboing"  has  never  been 
properly  developed  on  Argentine  railways.  Rarely  had  I  been  given 
temporary  carte  blanche  on  almost  every  train  in  the  country  when, 
as  a  second  stroke  of  fortune,  consular  business  turned  up  which  took 
me  into  various  sections  of  the  "camp"  without  cutting  me  off  from 
my  modest  official  income,  I  hastened  to  lay  in  a  supply  of  heavy 
garments,  for  the  first  trip  was  to  be  south,  and  the  end  of  April  had 
brought  an  autumn  chill  even  in  Buenos  Aires,  over  which  birds 
were  flying  northward  in  great  V-shaped  flocks. 

A  general  pass  is  more  than  a  saving  of  money;  it  gives  train  of- 
ficials an  exalted  notion  of  the  holder's  importance,  and  it  permits  him 
to  jump  off  anywhere  on  the  spur  of  the  moment.  Yet  for  many 
miles  south  I  saw  nothing  worthy  of  a  stop.  When  one  has  already 
visited  La  Plata,  capital  of  the  Province  of  Buenos  Aires,  a  short  hour 
below  the  metropolis  and  noted  for  its  university  and  its  rows  of 
venerable  eucalyptus  trees,  there  remains  little  to  attract  the  eye  in  the 
flat  expanse  of  that  province  as  it  unrolls  hour  after  hour  on  any  of 
the  lines  of  the  "Great  Southern."  Several  dairies,  which  maintain 
their  own  Iccherias  throughout  the  federal  capital,  punctuate  the  first 
miles ;  otherwise  the  landscape  is  a  mere  reminder  of  our  own  west- 
ern prairies.  Here  is  the  same  scanty  grass  and  clumps  of  bushes  re- 
sembling sagebrush,  the  same  flat  plain  with  its  horizon  barely  rising 
and  falling  perceptibly  with  the  motion  of  the  train.  The  only  un- 
familiar note  is  the  ostrich,  scattered  groups  of  wdiich  go  scuttling 
away  like  huge  ungainly  chickens  as  the  express  disturbs  them  at 
their  feeding.  At  least  we  should  call  this  Argentine  curiosity  an 
ostrich,  though  science  distinguishes  it  from  a  similar  species  in  the 


42  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Old  World  under  the  name  of  rhea  darwini,  and  to  the  natives  it  is  a 
fiandii.  Time  was  when  tawny  horsemen  pursued  these  great  birds 
across  the  pampas,  entangling  their  legs  in  the  bolas,  two  or  three 
ropes  ending  in  as  many  heavy  balls,  which  they  swung  over  their 
heads  as  they  rode ;  but  that  is  seen  no  more.  Even  the  waving  plains 
of  grass,  across  which  the  nomadic  Indian  roamed  and  the  gaucho 
careered  lassooing  wild  cattle,  are  gone.  Wheat  fields,  bare  with  the 
finished  harvest  in  this  autumn  season,  alternate  with  short  brown 
grass,  cropped  by  the  cattle  which  ever}'where  dot  the  landscape  for 
hour  after  monotonous  hour. 

The  gaucho,  with  his  long,  sharp  facon  stuck  through  his  belt,  who 
lighted  his  fogon  out  on  the  open  pampa  to  prepare  his  asado  con 
ciiero,  his  beef  roasted  in  the  hide,  who  killed  a  steer  for  his  morning 
beefsteak  or  slaughtered  a  lamb  for  a  pair  of  chops,  who  rolled  up  in 
his  saddle-blanket  wherever  night  overtook  him,  with  his  day-time 
leather  seat  as  pillow,  has  degenerated  into  the  "hired  man,"  the  mere 
peon,  usually  from  Spain  or  Italy,  who  would  be  dismayed  at  the 
thought  of  a  night  without  shelter  or  a  day  without  prepared  food. 
Only  a  scattered  remnant  of  the  real  cowboys  of  the  pampas  are  left, 
just  enough  to  show  the  present  domesticated  generation  the  stuff  of 
which  their  forerunners  were  forged;  and  even  these  are  usually  fat 
away  in  the  remotest  corners  of  the  country. 

Yet  the  newcomers  take  on  gradually  something  of  the  gaucho's 
look,  a  hardiness,  an  air  of  abstraction,  as  if  through  gazing  long  at 
monotonous  nothingness  they  come  to  concentrate  their  attention  in- 
wardly and  become  meditative  of  soul,  with  that  solemn,  self-reliant 
manner  of  men  who  never  turn  the  leaves  of  any  book  but  nature's. 
The  countrymen  of  Nevada  or  Arizona  have  the  same  weathered 
appearance  as  the  groups  gathered  about  the  rare  stations  at  which 
the  through  train  momentarily  halts ;  the  saddled  horses  tied  to  wooden 
rails  before  the  more  pretentious  buildings  among  tlie  little  clusters 
of  houses  set  out  on  the  unsheltered  open  prairie  might  easily  be  mis- 
taken for  Texas  mustangs.  In  these  groups  one  begins  to  see  sug- 
gestions of  Indian  blood,  mestizos  with  the  yellowish-brown  skin  and 
thick  black  hair  of  the  aborigines,  yet  with  a  stronger  hint  of  Euro- 
pean origin. 

Ordinarily  this  region  is  swirling  with  dust,  but  this  year  the  rains 
had  been  early  and  excessive,  and  the  monotonous  brown  prairie  was 
often  flooded,  the  dismal  houses  dripping;  the  wide  public  roads  were 
knee-deep   sloughs   along  which   tramping  would   indeed   have   been 


FAR  AND  WIDE  ON  THE  ARGENTINE  PAMPAS        43 

an  experience.  Clusters  of  farm  buildings,  generally  new,  stood  here 
and  there  in  groves  of  trees,  planted  trees,  which  in  t!ic  Argentine  are 
a  sign  of  opulence,  a  sort  of  seigneurial  luxury,  like  diamonds  or 
liveried  footmen.  The  trees  native  to  the  pampas  being  rare  and 
scrubby,  it  is  chielly  the  imported  eucalyptus  standing  in  little  clumps, 
English  sparrows  noisily  gossiping  among  them,  or  rising  in  broken 
lines  from  ihe  frequent  lakes  of  mirage  or  shallow  reality.  Boister- 
ous hackmen,  sprinkled  to  the  ears  with  mud,  attacked  in  force  the 
descending  passengers  at  every  station  serving  a  town  of  size  and  bore 
them  away  in  clumsy  bespattered  coaches.  Huge  two-wheeled  carts 
reminiscent  of  England  here  and  there  labored  along  the  bottomless 
road  from  station  to  town  under  incoming  freight  or  outgoing  country 
produce.  Town  after  town  was  monotonously  alike,  the  houses  built 
of  crude  bricks,  with  an  unfinished  air  suggesting  that  they  were  at 
most  mere  temporary  stopping-places  of  men  ready  to  pursue  fortune 
elsewhere  on  a  moment's  notice. 

The  chief  characteristic  of  Argentine  towns  is  their  roominess. 
The  space  they  cover  is  several  times  that  of  Andean  cities  of  equal 
population.  Though  the  houses  often  toe  the  street  in  the  Arab-Span- 
ish fashion,  they  are  frequently  far  apart  and  the  streets  are  wider 
than  even  Buenos  Aires  would  care  to  have  in  her  most  congested  sec- 
tion. No  doubt  each  hamlet  has  a  secret  hint  that  it  is  soon  to  be- 
come a  great  city,  and  lays  its  plans  accordingly.  Next  to  their  spacious- 
ness and  the  dreary  plainness  of  their  architecture,  these  towns  of  the 
I)ampas  strike  the  experienced  South  American  traveler  by  the  scarcity 
of  their  churches.  The  largest  of  them  seldom  shows  more  than  a 
single  steeple;  many  seem  to  have  no  places  of  worship  whatever. 
Nowhere  is  there  that  suggestion  common  to  the  atmosphere  of  the 
languid  cities  of  the  Andes  of  a  present  world  so  unpromising  that 
life  can  most  advantageously  be  spent  in  preparation  for  the  next. 

The  "Great  Southern"  carried  me  so  far  into  the  south  that  only  by 
straining  my  neck  could  I  see  the  Southern  Cross,  a  tilted,  less  strik- 
ing constellation  now  than  when  I  had  first  made  it  out  in  far-off 
Central  America  by  standing  on  tiptoe  and  peering  over  the  horizon. 
The  journey  might  almost  better  be  made  by  night  than  by  day,  for 
Argentine  sleeping-cars  are  comfortable  and  the  dreaiy,  unfurnished 
landscape  is  almost  oppressive.  The  only  natural  features  to  arouse 
a  flicker  of  interest  are  some  rock  hills  near  Tandil,  duplicated  far- 
ther on  in  another  little  rocky  range  known  as  the  Sierra  de  la  \^en- 
tana.     In  the  first  of  these  Bueuos  Aires  quarries  some  of  the  stone 


44  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

for  its  building  and  paving,  the  rest  being  brought  across  the  Plata 
from  Uruguay.  Few  large  countries  have  been  more  neglected  than 
the  Argentine  in  the  matter  of  natural  resources,  other  than  agri- 
CHltural.  Its  rare  deposits  of  stone  are  far  distant  from  where  the 
material  is  needed,  it  has  no  precious  minerals,  almost  no  forests, 
even  the  coal  used  on  its  railroads  must  be  brought  from  abroad. 
Yet  it  would  gladly  be  rid  of  some  of  its  stone.  Through  much  of 
the  south  it  is  hampered  by  a  tosca,  a  shelf  of  limestone  a  few  feet 
below  the  surface,  which  neither  water  nor  the  long  roots  of  the  al- 
falfa can  penetrate.  In  the  more  tropical  north,  particularly  along 
the  Parana,  the  alfalfales  produce  luxuriantly  for  twenty  years  and 
more  without  renewal.  In  the  south  the  calerous  soil  makes  vigorous 
pastures  on  which  fatten  succulent  beef  and  mutton,  highly  prized  by 
the  frigori  ficos;  but  the  frequent  droughts  are  disastrous  in  the  thin 
soil  regions,  and  at  such  times  endless  trains  carry  the  sheep  and 
"horned  cattle,"  as  the  local  distinction  has  it,  a  thousand  miles  north 
to  feed  in  the  Cordoba  hills. 

The  plain  which  seems  never  to  have  an  end  converges  at  last. 
like  all  the  railroads  to  the  south,  in  Bahia  Blanca.  This  bustling 
port  and  considerable  city,  with  its  immense  grain  elevators  and  its 
facilities  for  transferring  half  the  produce  of  the  Argentine  from 
trains  to  ships,  is  the  work  of  a  generation.  It  is  nearly  a  century 
now  since  the  federal  government  sent  soldiers  to  establish  in  the 
vicinity  of  this  great  bay  a  line  of  defense  against  the  Indians  of 
Patagonia,  but  the  town  itself  took  on  importance  only  toward  the 
end  of  the  last  century.  From  a  cluster  of  huts  among  the  sand- 
dunes  it  sprang  to  the  size  of  Duluth,  to  which  it  bears  a  resemblance 
in  occupation,  point  of  view,  and  paucity  of  historical  background. 
Tlie  Argentine  is  third  or  fourth  among  the  wheat  producing  coun- 
tries of  the  world,  and  of  later  years  Bahia  Blanca,  natural  focal 
point  of  all  the  great  southern  pampas,  has  outstripped  even  Buenos 
Aires  as  a  grain  port,  to  say  nothing  of  the  frozen  meat  from  its  im- 
mense frigori  ficos.  Of  all  the  cities  of  the  Argentine  it  is  the  most 
nearly  autonomous,  for  though  La  Plata  remains  the  provincial  capi- 
tal, the  overwhelming  commercial  importance  of  Bahia  Blanca  has 
given  it  a  self-assertiveness  that  threatens  some  day  to  make  it  the 
capital  of  a  newly  formed  province. 

A  long  vestibuled  train  carried  us  on  into  northern  Patagonia,  bet- 
ter known  now  in  the  Argentine  as  the  territories  of  Rio  Negro,  Chn 
but,  and  Santa  Cruz.    I  say  "us"  because  I  had  been  joined  by  a  former 


FAR  AND  WIDE  ON  THE  ARGENTINE  PAMPAS       45 

assistant  secretary  of  agriculture  of  our  own  land,  recently  attached 
as  an  adviser  to  the  similar  Argentine  bureau,  lie  was  as  profoundly 
ignorant  of  Spanish  as  I  of  agricultural  matters,  and  our  companion- 
ship proved  of  mutual  advantage.  All  that  night  we  rumbled  south 
and  west,  halting  now  and  then  at  little  jjampa  stations,  if  we  were 
to  believe  the  time-table.  For  we  were  both  snugly  ensconced  in  our 
berths,  the  ex-secretaiy  doubly  so,  since  nature  had  provided  kim 
with  a  more  than  imposing  bulk — until  the  breaking  of  a  rail  over 
a  wash-out  bounced  us  out  of  them.  Sleeping-cars  are  as  custom- 
ary in  the  Argentine  as  in  our  own  land  of  long  distances,  and  more 
comfortable.  At  the  height  of  the  season  at  Mar  del  Plata  as  many 
as  a  hundred  sleepers  a  night  make  the  journey  between  that  water- 
ing-place and  Buenos  Aires.  The  normal  Argentine  railroad  gauge 
is  nearly  ten  inches  wider  than  our  own,  which  is  one  of  the  reasons 
why  the  dormitorlos  seem  so  much  more  roomy  than  a  Pullman.  As 
in  the  international  expresses  01  Europe,  these  have  a  corridor  along 
one  side  of  the  car,  from  w'hich  open  two-berth  staterooms,  with 
doors  that  lock  and  individual  toilet  facilities.  The  cross-car  berths, 
one  soon  discovers,  are  easier  to  sleep  in  than  our  lengthwise  couches, 
and  the  dormitorios  do  away  with  what  Latin-Americans  consider, 
not  entirely  without  reason,  our  "shockingly  indecent"  system  of 
forcing  strangers,  of  either  sex_,  to  sleep  in  the  same  compartment, 
shielded  only  by  a  curtain. 

The  unconvertible  cabins,  preferable  by  night,  become  mere  cells 
by  dav,  however,  and  drive  niost  of  the  passengers  to  sit  in  the  din- 
ing cars.  Here  the  waiters,  like  the  donnitorio  porters,  are  white,  with 
king's-bed-chamber  manners ;  and  the  six  course  meals  are  moderate 
in  price  and  usually  excellent — except  the  dessert,  the  ubiquitous,  un- 
failing, never-varying  duke  dc  membrillo,  a  stone-hard  quince  jelly 
which  brings  to  a  sad  end  virtually  every  public  repast  in  the  Argen- 
tine. The  trains  are  not  heated ;  instead  there  are  thick  doormats  un- 
der each  seat,  and  it  is  a  rare  traveler  in  the  south  between  April 
and  October  who  does  not  carry  with  him  a  blanket  bound  with  a 
shawl-strap. 

The  mud-bespattered  countrymen  at  the  stations  that  appeared  with 
the  dull  autumn  daylight  seemed  to  be  largely  Spanish  in  origin, 
some  still  wearing  boitias  and  other  reminders  of  Europe  that  looked 
out  of  keeping  with  the  soil-caked  saddle  horses  awaiting  them  be- 
hind the  railroad  buildings.  Most  of  them  appeared  to  have  ridden 
in  to  buy  lottery  tickets,  or  to  find  which  tickets  hnrl  won  in  the  latest 


46  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

drawing;  the  raucous-voiced  trainboys  sold  more  to  these  modern 
gauchos  than  on  the  train,  especially  the  list  of  winning  numbers  at 
ten  centavps.  The  thought  came  to  us  that  even  if  there  are  no  other 
reprehensible  features  to  a  national  lottery,  the  habit  it  breeds  among 
workmen  of  spending  their  time  hoping  for  a  prize  a  week,  instead  of 
pitching  in  and  earning  a  weekly  prize,  is  at  least  sufficient  to  con- 
demn it. 

My  companion  was  making  the  trip  for  the  purpose  of  studying  the 
soil.  A  splendid  chance  he  had  to  do  so  with  most  of  it  under  water! 
The  distribution  of  rain  seems  to  be  poorly  managed  in  the  Argen- 
tine. If  the  country  is  not  suffering  from  drought,  it  is  apt  to  be 
complaining  of  floods,  or,  in  the  warmer  and  more  fertile  north,  of 
the  locusts,  which  sometimes  sweep  in  from  the  wilderness  of  the 
Chaco  in  such  clouds  that  the  project  has  seriously  been  considered 
of  erecting 'an  enormous  net,  supported  perhaps  by  balloons,  to  stop 
them. 

We  brought  up  late  that  afternoon  in  the  frontier  town  of  Neuquen, 
in  the  national  territory  of  the  same  name.  A  gargon  corseted  into 
a  tuxedo  served  us  dinner,  for  so  they  dared  call  it,  in  a  rambling  one- 
story  wooden  hotel  scattered  over  the  block  nearest  the  station,  the  only 
thing  worth  considering  on  the  bill  of  fare  being  "bife"  (beefee)  or, 
as  the  waiter  more  exactly  put  it,  "asado  de  vaca,"  requiring  the  teeth 
of  a  stone-crusher  and  the  digestion  of  a  nandil.  There  is  something 
of  the  atmosphere  of  our  own  frontier  towns  in  those  of  the  Argen- 
tine, but  not  the  same  studied  roughness  of  character,  no  display 
of  shooting-irons.  The  tamest  of  our  western  cowboys  would  prob- 
ably have  shot  on  sight  those  prancing,  tuxedoed  waiters  and  sent 
the  proprietor  to  join  them  for  the  atrociousness  of  his  meals.  Just 
what  would  have  been  his  reaction  to  the  beds  to  which  we  were 
afterward  assigned — sky  blue  and  pink  landscapes  so  gorgeously 
painted  on  foot  and  headboards  that  we  thought  it  was  dawn  every 
time  we  woke  up — is  more  than  I  can  guess. 

The  line  which  the  "Great  Southern"  hopes  soon  to  push  over  the 
Andes  to  join  the  railways  of  Chile  in  the  vicinity  of  Temuco  ran  no 
trains  beyond  Neuquen  on  the  Sunday  which  finally  dawned  in  earn- 
est over  our  picturesque  beds,  but  as  pass-holders  we  had  no  great 
difficulty  in  foisting  ourselves  upon  a  young  English  superintendent 
westward  bound  on  an  inspection  tour.  In  his  track  automobile  we 
screamed  away  across  the  bleak  pampas  of  Patagonia,  a  hundred 
and   twenty   miles   and  back   to  Zapala,   the   vast   monotonous  plain 


FAR  AND  WIDE  ON  THE  ARGENTINE  PAMPAS       47 

steadily  rising  to  an  elevation  of  seven  thousand  feet  and  bringing 
us  almost  to  the  foot  of  the  great  snow-bound  range  of  the  Andes 
forming  the  Chilean  border.  The  air  was  cool,  dry,  and  bracing  even 
down  at  Neuquen ;  at  Zapala  the  winler-and-mountain  cold  was  so 
penetrating  as  to  cause  us  not  only  to  wonder  at  but  to  protest  volubly 
against  the  strange  strain  of  puritanism  which  had  invaded  even  this 
distant  corner  of  the  Argentine  and  made  it  a  felony  for  the  frontier 
shop-keeper  to  sell  anything  stronger  than  beer  on  Sundays.  Forty 
years  ago  all  this  region  was  an  unproductive  waste  across  whicli 
roamed  half-naked  Indians,  holeando  the  nandiies  for  their  sustenance 
and  living  in  toldos,  easily  transportable  skin  tents  like  those  of  cer- 
tain tribes  of  Arab  Bedouins.  To-day  we  were  not  even  armed. 
Nowhere  was  there  a  remnant  of  those  "Patagones,"  people  of  foot- 
prints so  large  that  the  southern  end  of  South  America  was  named 
for  them.  The  young  Argentine  general  who  was  once  assigned  the 
task  of  clearing  northern  Patagonia  of  the  nomadic,  bandit-like 
aborigines  had  done  his  work  with  such  Spanish  thoroughness  that 
the  entire  tribe  was  annihilated,  their  chiefs  dying  as  prisoners  on  the 
island  of  Martin  Garcia.  The  government  paid  the  expenses  of  this 
expedition  by  dividing  among  the  officers  (not,  be  it  noted,  the  sol- 
diers) the  hundred  million  acres  of  land  it  added  to  the  national 
domain,  and  by  selling  the  rest  of  it  in  enormous  tracts  at  such 
magnificent  prices  as  three  cents  an  acre.  To-day  intelligent  argen- 
tinos  are  figuratively  kicking  themselves  that  they  did  not  issue  govern- 
ment bonds  instead  and  save  this  immense  territory  for  the  home- 
steaders who  would  now  gladly  settle  upon  it. 

To  tell  the  truth  the  region  did  not  look  like  one  for  which  men 
would  die  of  home-sickness, — dry  and  bushy,  like  parts  of  Texas 
or  northern  Mexico,  with  chaparral  and  bristling  clumps  of  stuntetl 
growth  bunched  out  here  and  there  across  a  plain  that  struck  one 
as  essentially  arid  for  all  the  jX)ols  of  water  left  by  the  unprecedented 
rain.  My  authoritative  companion  assured  us,  however,  that  it  had 
every  sign  of  great  fertility,  though  requiring  irrigation  on  a  large 
scale,  a  beginning  of  which  has  already  been  made  in  the  vicinity  of 
the  Rio  Negro.  Yet  only  a  rude  and  solitary  nature  surrounded  us 
on  all  the  journey,  the  same  flat  monotony,  dotted  here  and  there  with 
flocks  of  sheep  guarded  by  lonely  half-Indian  or  Gallego  shepherds, 
which  stretches  all  the  way  to  the  Straits  of  Magellan. 

Flocks  of  pheasants  flew  up  every  little  while  as  we  screamed  past 
them;  the  hoarse  cry  of  the  chajds,  a  species  of  wild  turkey,  alter- 


48  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

iiated  with  the  piercing  call  of  the  little  tcru-tcru.  Only  at  rare  in- 
tervals did  a  scattered  flock  of  sheep  or  an  isolated  makeshift 
rancho  with  a  saddled  horse  behind  it  give  a  human  touch  to  the 
monotonous  desolation.  Where  the  foothills  of  the  Andes  began 
to  send  us  undulating  over  great  smooth  ridges,  like  a  bark  rocked  by 
a  distant  storm  at  sea,  there  appeared  wagon  caravans  bound  for 
Chile,  still  days  away  over  the  lofty  pass  ahead.  Gradually  the  great 
snow-thatched  wall  of  the  Andes,  endless  to  the  north  and  south,  rose 
to  shut  off  all  the  horizon  before  us,  wind-rent  clouds  dashing  them- 
selves to  shreds  against  it.  Yet  here  in  the  temperate  south  the  snow 
and  ice-fields  seemed  less  striking,  much  less  beautiful  than  w^hen 
towering  above  the  sun-flooded  tropics. 

On  our  return  to  Buenos  Aires  we  stopped  at  an  agricultural  station 
near  the  town  of  Rio  Negro,  where  irrigation  was  already  showing 
results.  Baled  alfalfa  lay  in  quantities  at  the  stations;  large  vine- 
yards, much  as  they  looked  out  of  place  in  this  landscapeless  region, 
were  producing  well.  There  being  no  passenger  train  to  rescue  us, 
we  got  telegraphic  permission  to  take  the  first  east-boimd  freight.  Be- 
fore the  delay  became  unduly  monotonous  a  train  rose  over  the  flat 
horizon  and  rolled  in  upon  us.  We  made  our  way  along  the  thirty- 
€)dd  cars  loaded  with  sheep  to  what  in  our  own  land  would  have  been 
a  comfortable  caboose — and  climbed  into  an  ordinary  box-car  that 
had  all  too  evidently  been  recently  and  often  used  for  the  transpor- 
tation of  coal.  There  was  not  even  an  improvised  seat  in  it;  train- 
men and  the  sheep  care-takers  sat  on  the  bare  floor  with  their  backs 
against  the  sooty  wall  and  bumped  along  like  penniless  and  unresource- 
fnl  hoboes.  I  would  have  given  several  pesos  to  have  heard  the  re- 
marks of  an  American  brakeman  who  could  have  looked  in  ttpon  his 
Argentine  fellows  as  we  jolted  across  the  apparently  level  plains  with 
the  bitter  chill  of  the  pampas  settling  down  upon  us. 

We  gladly  dropped  off  at  Darwin,  where  we  hired  next  morning 
what  the  argentino  calls  a  "soolkee"  and  drove  to  the  island  of  Choele- 
Choel,  with  the  assistance  of  a  cumbersome  government  ferry.  This 
thirteen  square  leagues  of  fertile  loam  soil  between  two  branches  of 
the  Rio  Negro  is  one  of  the  most  prosperous  communities  in  south- 
ern Argentine,  with  half  a  dozen  villages,  roads  sometimes  passable 
even  in  the  wet  season,  and  noted  for  the  variety  of  immigration  with 
which  it  has  been  peopled.  My  companion,  weary  perhaps  of  talking 
through  an  interpreter,  was  particularly  eager  to  see  what  remnants 
remained  of  a  Welsh  colony  once  established  here.     We  drove  zig- 


FAR  AND  WIDE  ON  THI<:  ARGENTINE  PAMPAS       49 

zagging  along  the  wide  checkerboard  earth  roads  between  endless  wire 
fences  behind  which  many  men  were  plowing  with  oxen  and  a  few 
with  up-to-date  riding  gang-plows.  Once  we  paused  to  talk  with  one 
Villanova,  political  boss  of  the  island,  but  when  my  companion  brought 
up  the  subject  nearest  his  heart,  the  man  instantly  showed  opposi- 
tion to  the  estabhshment  of  agricultural  schools. 

"We  have  no  middle  class  in  the  Argentine,"  he  explained,  "and 
we  do  not  want  one.  We  want  only  absentee  landlords — or  at  least 
we  have  no  way  of  getting  rid  of  them — and  laborers,  men  who  actu- 
ally work  and  produce.  Agricultural  schools  would  give  us  a  class 
too  proud  of  their  schooling  to  work,  and  at  the  same  time  without 
property.  The  distinction  between  the  man  who  toils  and  tlie  man 
who  owns  is  wide  in  tlie  Argentine,  but  it  would  be  no  improvement 
to  fill  in  the  gulf  with  a  lot  of  haughty,  penniless  drones," 

My  companion  had  all  but  given  up  hope  of  using  his  native  tongue 
directly  when  there  was  pointed  out  to  us  a  farm  said  to  be  owned  by 
a  Welshman.  But  only  his  lanky  daughter  of  sixteen  was  at  home. 
The  ex-secretary  addressed  her  eagerly;  here  at  last  he  would  get 
first-hand  information.  The  girl  shifted  from  one  undeveloped  shank 
to  the  other,  backed  away  toward  the  unpainted  frame  farmhouse 
from  which  she  had  emerged,  struggling  to  answer  a  question  in 
English,  then  turning  to  me,  she  burst  forth,  all  suggestion  of  em- 
barrassment gone,  in  rapid-fire  Spanish : 

**You  see  I  was  born  in  the  Chubut,  and  English  is  only  my  third 
tongue,  for  Spanish  is  my  native  language  and  father  and  mother  al- 
ways speak  Welsh  at  home  and  I  almost  never  hear  English  and  .  .  ." 

My  companion  bowed  his  head  in  resignation  and  turned  our  weary 
horse  back  across  the  island  toward  the  ferry. 

The  chill  of  autumn  gradually  disappeared  from  the  air  as  the  fastest 
train  in  South  America  dashed  in  less  than  five  hours,  with  only  one 
three-minute  stop  to  change  engines,  from  Buenos  Aires  to  Rosario, 
two  hundred  miles  northwest  of  the  federal  capital.  The  rich-green 
immensity  of  the  well  cultivated  fields  bordering  the  River  Parana 
were  a  contrast  to  the  bleak,  bare,  brown  prairies  of  the  south,  and 
the  gang-plow,  up-to-date  methods  of  our  great  West  were  ever}'- 
where  in  evidence.  In  the  seat  behind  me  two  men  were  assuring  each 
other  that  "the  lands  of  this  region  are  worth  ten  times  those  of  the  in- 
terior," and  it  was  easy  to  believe  them.  The  rich  black  loam  soil 
that  came  to  light  behind  the  plows  is  said  to  produce  two  crops  of 
splendid  potatoes  annually  without  the  use  of  fertilizer  and  with  no 


50  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

change  in  crops  for  twenty  years.  Though  the  day  was  warm  and 
sunny,  the  cars  remained  hermetically  sealed  throughout  the  journey, 
for  the  argcntino  is  true  to  type  in  his  dread  of  a  breath  of  fresh  air. 
Scarcely  a  glimpse  of  the  River  Parana  did  we  catch,  though  we  skirted 
it  all  the  way  to  Rosario. 

This  second  city  of  the  republic  has  been  called  the  Chicago  of  the 
Argentine.  It  is  more  nearly  the  Omaha  or  Atlanta,  not  merely  in 
size  but  in  the  material  prosperity,  and  the  appearance  and  point  of 
view  that  go  with  it,  which  its  position  as  a  river  port  open  to  large 
ocean  steamers  and  as  the  natural  outlet  of  all  the  fertile  provinces  of 
northern  Argentine  has  given  it.  Like  Buenos  Aires  it  has  almost 
no  factoi-y  chimneys  to  emphasize  its  air  of  activity,  which  concentrates 
in  the  vicinity  of  the  wharves.  A  stroll  through  its  busy,  citified 
streets  is  worth  the  exertion,  or,  better  still,  a  round  of  its  electric 
car  lines ;  but  one  would  no  more  expect  to  find  the  picturesque  and 
the  legendary  past  in  Rosario  than  in  Newark.  Large  and  prosperous 
as  it  has  grown,  it  is  not  the  capital  of  its  province,  much  to  the  dis- 
gust of  its  energetic  citizens,  but  is  ruled  from  Santa  Fe,  a  languid 
little  town  of  several  times  the  age  but  scarcely  one  eighth  the  popu- 
lation of  the  bustling  provincial  metropolis.  There  are  advantages 
in  being  a  capital  in  the  Argentine  which  we  of  the  north  would 
hardly  suspect. 

I  slipped  on  up  the  Parana  to  have  a  look  at  this  capital  which 
the  Rosarians  so  universally  tongue-lash.  A  splendidly  fertile,  softly 
rolling,  velvety-green  country,  with  dark-red  cattle  standing  in  groups 
here  and  there  to  give  contrast,  was  the  chief  impression  left  by  a 
journey  of  several  hundred  kilometers  through  the  province  of  Santa 
Fe.  Yet  for  some  reason  the  city  of  the  same  name,  though  barely 
a  hundred  miles  north  of  Rosario,  was  humidly  hot  and  swarming 
with  flies,  its  atmosphere  that  of  an  ambitionless  town  of  the  tropics 
content  to  dawdle  through  life  on  what  the  frequent  influxes  of  poli- 
ticians bring  it.  Far  across  the  river,  which  here  spreads  out  into 
an  immense  lagoon,  lay  hazy  white  on  a  distant  knoll  the  city  of 
Parana,  capital  of  the  province  of  Entre  Rios,  between  the  rivers 
Parana  and  Uruguay,  which  unite  at  length  to  form  the  Plata. 

Another  floor-flat,  fertile  plain,  with  many  ranchos  and  villages, 
with  "soolkees"  jogging  along  the  broad  earth  roads  between  wheat 
and  alfalfa  fields  and  pastures  dotted  with  fat  cattle  and  plump  sheep 
until  the  eyes  tired  of  seeing  them,  marked  the  trip  westward  from 
Santa   Fe.     Here,   to   all   appearances,   was   the   best   farming   land 


FAR  AND  WIDE  ON  THE  ARGENTINE  PAMPAS        51 

imaginable,  though  one  could  easily  imagine  better  farming.  Crowds 
of  shaggy  yet  prosperous-looking  countrymen  gathered  at  every  sta- 
tion. The  alfalfales  were  still  deep-green,  though  it  was  already  be- 
coming late  autumn ;  golden  ears  of  corn  of  a  size  that  even  Kansas 
would  envy  were  being  husked  from  the  standing  stalks  and  heaped  to 
overflowing  into  huge  trojes,  stack-shaped  bins  made  of  split  palm- 
trunks  or  other  open-work  material. 

I  came  at  length  to  one  of  the  oldest  and  most  famous  of  Argentine 
towns,  a  yellow-white  city  in  a  shallow  valley,  with  an  almost  Oriental 
aspect,  and  backed  by  hills — and  hills  alone  are  noteworthy  enough  to 
bring  a  city  fame  in  the  Argentine.  In  fact,  Cordoba  sits  in  the  only 
rugged  section  of  the  country,  except  where  the  Andes  begin  to  climb 
out  of  it  to  the  west.  Among  these  ranges,  sometimes  called,  with 
the  exaggeration  natural  to  young  nations,  the  "Argentine  Switzer- 
land," are  many  summer  hotels  and  colonies,  strange  as  it  may  seem 
to  go  north  for  the  summer  in  the  south  temperate  zone. 

Cordoba,  the  geographical  center  of  the  Argentine  Republic,  is  cen- 
turies old,  with  more  traditions,  more  respect  for  age,  than  Buenos 
Aires,  with  many  reminders  of  old  Spain  and  of  the  conservative, 
time-marked  towns  of  the  Andes.  In  Cordoba  it  is  easy  to  imagine 
the  atmosphere  of  the  federal  capital  of  a  century  ago.  There  is  still 
a  considerable  "colonial"  atmosphere ;  respect  for  old  customs  still 
survives ;  age  counts,  which  is  rare  in  the  Argentine,  a  country  like 
our  own  full  of  youth  and  confidence  in  the  future,  and  the  correspond- 
ing impatience  with  the  past,  with  precedent.  Peru  had  already  been 
conquered  and  settled  when  Cordoba  was  made  a  halfway  station  be- 
tween the  unimportant  river-landing  called  Buenos  Aires  and  the 
gold  mines  of  the  former  Inca  Empire,  and  it  was  founded  by  Spanish 
nobles  of  a  better  class  than  the  adventurers  who  followed  Pizarro 
on  his  bloody  expedition.  Many  of  the  families  of  Cordoba  boast 
themselves  descendants  of  those  hidalgos,  though  to  most  argentinos 
ancestry  seems  as  unimportant,  compared  with  the  present,  as  it  does 
to  the  average  American.  The  Cordobans,  like  the  ancient  families 
of  the  Andes,  look  down  upon  newly  won  wealth  as  something  in- 
finitely inferior  to  shabby  gentility,  though  the  latter  has  been  refur- 
bished of  late  years  by  increasing  incomes  from  the  neighboring  estates. 
The  Portcfio  has  little  sympathy  for  the  Cordoban  attitude  toward 
life.  He  pokes  fun  at  the  conservative  old  city,  calling  it  the  "Mecca" 
of  the  Argentine  because  of  the  pilgrims  who  come  at  certain  sea- 
sons of  the  year  to  worship  its  bejeweled  saints ;  he  asserts  that  its 


52  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

ostensibly  "high-brow"  people  "buy  books  but  do  not  read  them."  The 
Cordoban  retaliates  by  rating  Cordoba,  and  perhaps  Salta,  the  only 
"aristocratic"  towns  in  the  Argentine,  and  has  kept  the  old  Spanish 
disdain  of  commerce,  which  is  naturally  a  disdain  of  Buenos  Aires. 

The  conservative  old  families  do  not,  of  course,  accept  newcomers 
easily.  There  is  a  strong  race,  as  well  as  class,  prejudice.  Up  to 
half  a  century  ago  no  student  was  admitted  to  the  university  unless 
he  could  show  irrefutable  proof  of  "pure"  blood,  that  is,  of  unbroken 
European  ancestry.  That  rule  might  be  in  force  to  this  day  but 
for  the  strong  hand  of  the  federal  government.  The  famous  uni- 
versity, founded  in  1605  by  the  Jesuits,  and  ranking  with  that  of 
Lima  as  the  oldest  in  America,  is  outwardly  an  inconspicuous  two- 
story  building,  though  there  are  artistic  old  paintings  and  cedar-of- 
Tucuman  carvings  inside  that  are  worth  seeing.  The  students  who 
attend  it  are,  however,  by  no  means  unobtrusive,  though  they  do 
not  seem  to  give  quite  such  exclusive  attention  to  the  color  of  their 
gloves  and  the  brand  of  their  perfumes  as  do  their  prototypes  in  the 
federal  capital.  It  is  natural,  too,  that  such  a  community  should  re- 
tain an  air  of  piety.  Its  ancient  moss-grown  cathedral,  likewise  of 
Jestait  construction,  with  a  far-famed  tower,  is  but  one  of  some 
thirty  churches  in  a  town  of  a  scant  thirty  thousand  inhabitants. 
Priests  and  monks  give  it  by  their  number  and  conspicuousness  an 
atmosphere  quite  unUke  Buenos  Aires,  with  its  scarcely  noticeable 
low  Grecian  cathedral,  its  lack  of  church  towers,  and  its  rare  priests. 
In  Cordoba  there  are  even  beggar  monks  who  make  regular  tours  of 
the  province,  reminiscent  of  medieval  Spain.  The  church  and  its  func- 
tionaries own  many  fine  estancias,  for  pilgrims  have  always  come  in 
numbers,  and  society  is  pious  to  the  point  of  fanaticism.  If  one  may 
believe  the  Porteno,  the  conservatism  and  fanaticism  of  Cordoba 
would  be  worse  than  it  is  had  not  the  central  government  sent  to  the 
university  a  number  of  German  Protestant  professors,  who  have  had 
some  influence  on  the  community,  not  so  much  in  Germanizing  as  in 
breaking  down  ancient  prejudices. 

Among  the  amusing  old  customs  that  remain  are  some  that  lend  a 
touch  of  the  picturesque  to  offset  a  certain  tendency  toward  the  mod- 
em. Cows  are  still  driven  through  the  streets,  attended  by  their  calves, 
and  are  milked  before  each  client's  door ;  the  conservative  Cordoban 
will  have  none  of  this  new-fangled  notion  of  having  his  milk  brought 
in  bottles,  in  which  there  may  be  a  percentage  of  water.  Here  there 
is  still  the  weekly  band  concert  and  plaza  promenade,  with  the  two 


FAR  AND  WIDE  ON  THE  ARGENTINE  PAMPAS        53 

sexes  marching  in  opposite  directions ;  here  tiie  duenna  is  in  her  glory 
and  prospective  husbands  whisper  their  assertions  through  iron-grilled 
windows.  The  gcnte  del  pueblo,  or  rank-and-file  citizens,  nearly  all 
with  a  considerable  proportion  of  that  Indian  blood  almost  unknown 
in  Buenos  Aires,  live  in  adobe  thatched  houses  in  the  outskirts  and 
have  the  appearance,  as  well  as  repute,  of  little  industry,  with  the  An- 
dean tendency  to  work  only  a  few  days  a  week  since  foreign  industry- 
has  raised  their  wages  to  a  point  where  frequent  vacations  are  possible. 
Cactus  and  donkeys  add  a  suggestion  of  Andean  aridity  in  the  out- 
skirt  section,  over  which  floats  now  and  then  a  subtle  breath  of  the 
tropics. 

Cordoba  in  its  shallow  valley,  veiled  by  thick  banks  of  white  mist, 
was  more  beautiful  on  the  morning  I  left  than  when  more  plainly 
seen.  As  our  train  rose  above  it  to  the  vast  level  pampa  the  city  dis- 
appeared, but  all  along  the  western  horizon  lay  its  famous  mountains. 
a  long  ridge,  saw-like  in  places,  turning  indigo  blue  when  the  sun  went 
down  on  a  brilliant  day.  On  the  other  side  of  the  train  still  lay  the 
monotonous,  flat,  low  Argentine  pampa,  without  hedges,  ditches,  al- 
most without  trees,  the  roads  mere  wide  spaces  reserved  for  travel. 
The  law  requires  that  federal  roads  be  fifty  meters  broad,  but  in  this 
land  of  unlimited  space  and  little  stone  no  law  can  keep  them  from 
being  impassable  sloughs  in  the  rainy  season  and  rivers  of  dust  in  the 
dry.  Even  here  were  many  enormous  estancias,  single  estates  of  halt 
a  million  acres,  which  the  train  took  hours  to  cross,  though  they  are 
small  compared  with  some  in  the  frontier  country  of  the  south.  Here 
are  estancicros  who  have  the  impression  that  the  sun  rises  and  sets 
on  their  property — which  is  not  without  its  influence  on  their  charac- 
ters and  especially  on  those  of  their  children.  In  the  "good  old  days," 
which  were  not  so  long  ago  in  the  Argentine,  persons  with  money, 
political  influence,  or  a  military  record  could  acquire  vast  tracts  of 
territory  at  trifling  cost,  and  up  to  the  present  generation  these  landed 
proprietors,  among  them  most  of  the  old  families  of  Cordoba,  were 
virtually  monarchs  of  all  they  surveyed.  Now  the  government,  once 
so  i^rodigal  with  its  land,  is  beginning  to  see  the  error  of  its  ways,  and 
is  forming  the  habit  of  talking  in  terms  of  square  kilometers  instead 
of  square  leagues,  as  well  as  favoring  bona  fide  settlers,  though  it 
still  does  not  require  those  who  buy  public  lands  at  a  song  to  settle 
upon  and  improve  them. 

Perhaps  once  each  half  hour  did  a  more  pretentious  estancia  house, 
surrounded  by  its  thin  grove  of  precious  eucalyptus,  break  the  monot- 


54  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

ony  of  flat  plain  and  makeshift  ranchos.  It  is  the  scarcity  of  trees 
no  doubt  that  makes  birds  so  rare  in  the  Argentine.  The  two-com- 
partment, oven-shaped  mud  nests  of  the  hornero  on  the  crosspieces  of 
the  telegraph  poles  were  almost  the  only  signs  of  them,  except  of 
course  the  occasional  nandues  loping  away  across  the  pampa.  The 
more  and  more  open-work  reed  shacks  began  to  suggest  almost  per- 
petual summer.  Then  all  at  once  I  ceased  feeling  the  increasing  heat, 
suddenly  put  down  my  window,  and  a  moment  later  was  hurrying 
into  a  sweater.  For  a  pampero  had  blown  up  from  the  south,  and 
seemed  bent  on  penetrating  to  the  marrow  of  my  bones. 

When  I  peered  out  of  my  sleeping-car  cabin  next  morning,  a  consid- 
erable change  of  landscape  met  the  eye.  The  "rapido"  was  crawling 
into  Santiago  del  Estero,  and  I  seemed  to  have  been  transported  over- 
night from  the  rich  green  fields  of  the  Parana  back  to  the  dreary  Andes, 
or,  more  exactly,  to  the  coastlands  of  Peru  or  Bolivia.  Founded  in 
the  middle  of  the  sixteenth  centur}%  on  the  bank  of  a  river  that  be- 
comes salty  a  little  farther  on,  and  forms  in  the  rainy  season  large 
csteros,  or  brackish  backwaters  and  lagoons,  "St.  James  of  the 
Swamp"  still  suffers  intensely  for  lack  of  water.  It  is  unfortunate 
that  nature  does  not  divide  her  rains  more  evenly  in  the  Argentine. 
Farther  south  only  the  tops  of  the  fence  posts  were  protruding  from 
the  flood  in  some  places;  here  the  country  seemed  to  be  habitually 
dying  of  thirst. 

The  main  line  of  the  "Central  Argentine"  does  not  run  into  San- 
tiago, but  operates  a  little  branch  from  La  Banda  ("Across  the 
River"),  because  of  the  treachery  of  the  wide,  shifty,  sandy  stream  on 
W'hich  it  lies.  To-day  the  railroad  has  a  great  iron  bridge  some  two 
miles  long,  successor  to  the  several  less  hardy  ones,  the  ruins  of 
which  may  be  seen  just  protruding  from  the  sandy  bed  along  the  way. 
The  company  asserts  that  it  spends  more  to  keep  up  its  road  into 
Santiago  than  it  gets  back  from  that  city  in  traflic,  but  its  concession 
requires  it  to  maintain  contact  with  what  is  reputed  the  most  "native" 
capital  of  province  still  left  in  the  Argentine.  Center  of  what  is  said 
to  be  the  least  fertile  section  of  the  country,  it  remains,  for  a  time 
at  least,  to  the  part-Indian  race  which  the  South  American  calls  native, 
the  ambitionless  cholo  or  mestizo,  with  his  Mohammedan  indifference 
to  the  future,  his  inertia  before  modern  progress.  In  other  words, 
Santiago  is  an  example  of  how  immigration  is  driving  the  native  town 
as  it  is  the  native  individual  into  the  most  distant  and  poorest  corners 
of  the  Argentine. 


FAR  AND  WIDE  ON  THE  ARGENTINE  PAMPAS       55 

The  town  is  built  of  crude  bricks  or  baked  mud,  the  only  material 
available,  and  except  in  the  center  it  is  a  disintegrated  collection  of 
huts  with  ugly  high  fronts  and  the  air  of  never  having  reached  ma- 
turity in  growth,  though  they  have  long  since  in  age.  It  has  few 
paved  streets  and  no  street-cars,  though  it  is  overrun  by  a  veritable 
plague  of  those  noisy,  impudent  hackmen  who  swarm  in  rural  and 
provincial  Argentine  and  over  whom  the  police  seem  to  have  neither 
influence  nor  authority.  A  dead-dry,  yellow  prairie  grass  spreads 
wherever  the  ground  is  not  frankly  sterile;  chaparral  and  other 
desert  brush  grows  even  within  the  town.  Its  thatched  ranches  of 
reeds,  to  be  found  anywhere  a  few  blocks  back  of  the  central  plaza, 
are  overrun  with  goats,  pigs,  cur  dogs,  and  naked  children,  like  the 
most  backward  towns  of  the  Andes.  Here  are  to  be  found  the  choclo, 
hero,  chicJia,  and  other  corn  products  common  to  the  Andean  cuisine, 
the  same  thin  sheets  of  sun-dried  beef,  the  swarming  gente  del  pueblo 
so  common  to  Peru  and  Ecuador,  so  unknown  in  Buenos  Aires.  The 
popular  speech  is  again  the  Quichua  of  the  Incas,  Santiago  being  the 
only  Argentine  town  of  any  size  where  it  has  survived,  though  it  is  a 
Quichua  as  different  from  that  of  Cuzco  as  the  Italian  of  Florence 
is  from  that  of  Naples.  Most  of  the  children  and  many  of  the  adults 
go  barefooted,  a  rare  custom  in  the  Argentine;  virtually  all  citizens 
have  the  incorrigible  Latin-American  habit  of  stopping  all  talk  to  gaze 
open-mouthed  at  a  passing  stranger,  entire  groups  of  men  on  the  street 
corners  turning  their  heads  to  stare  after  him  until  one  feels  genuine 
misgiving  lest  they  permanently  dislocate  their  ostrich  necks. 

There  are  reminders,  too,  of  the  g}'psy  section  of  Granada  or  Se- 
ville, hints  of  Luxor  or  iVssuan  in  Upper  Egypt,  as  well  as  of  the 
somnolent  tov.-ns  in  the  half-tropical  valleys  of  the  Andes.  The 
thatched  mud  huts  are  surrounded  witli  cactus  hedges  on  which  the 
family  wash  hangs  drying;  everything  is  coated  with  the  fine  white 
dust  of  the  unpaved  streets,  through  which  the  half-Indian  w^omen 
wade  almost  ankle  deep,  their  slattern  skirts  sweeping  it  into  clouds 
behind  them.  Now  and  then  there  passes  one  of  these  chola  females 
leading  through  the  dust-river  a  donkey  bestridden  by  a  girl  of  the 
same  race  and  drawing  by  two  ropes  tied  to  knobs  in  its  ends  a  rolling 
barrel  of  water,  the  chocolate-colored  river  water  on  which  the  tow^i 
seems  chiefly  to  subsist.  A  dry,  cracked  soil  under  an  ardent  sun,  thin 
animals  eating  greedily  at  poor  tufts  of  scanty  vegetation,  cactus  used 
as  field  fences  as  well  as  inclosing  the  miserable  ranchos,  cactus  with 
twisted  trunks  that  look  like  enormous  snakes  about  to  strike,  immense 


56  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

cactus  candelabras  of  ten  or  fifteen  branches,  a  few  poor  chickens  pick- 
ing at  the  sterile  soil  about  the  ranchos  by  day  and  roosting  by  night 
in  the  rare  scraggly  trees,  scores  of  hungry-looking  goats  browsing  on 
nothing,  yet  somehow  keeping  energy  enough  to  gambol  about  a  scene 
usually  devoid  of  any  form  of  unnecessary  activity,  a  few  almost 
leafless  scrub  trees  on  which  hang  rags  of  raw  meat  sun-drying  into 
charqid,  or,  as  they  call  it  in  southeastern  South  America,  tasajo — 
these  make  up  the  background  of  almost  any  picture  of  Santiago. 
Against  this  stand  out  in  slight  relief  bronzed  cholos  loafing  in  the 
shade  of  the  huts,  pigs  and  children  disputing  the  same  dreary  play- 
grounds, men  shirtless  or  in  shirt  sleeves,  with  rather  lifeless,  in- 
expressive brown  features,  women  dressed  in  shapeless  thin  cotton 
gowns  of  brilliant  colors — apple-green,  pink,  shrieking  red — their 
rarely  washed  faces  surmounted  by  masses  of  coarse,  thick,  straight 
black  hair  knotted  carelessly  together  at  the  neck,  little  girls  carrying 
naked  babies  almost  as  large  as  themselves,  nearly  all  holding  in 
one  hand  the  dried-gourd  bowl  of  mate  heated  over  a  fagot  fire  in 
the  open  air,  sucking  it  eagerly  yet  languidly  through  the  strav/- 
shaped  metal  hombilla.  A  completely  naked  gamin  of  five  gallops 
about  astride  a  stick,  his  slightly  older  and  no  more  expensively  at- 
tired brother  doing  the  like  on  a  scrubby  horse  without  saddle  or 
bridle,  both  scattering  the  pigs,  dogs,  and  chickens  at  every  turn. 
From  the  hut  doors  or  the  midst  of  such  families  seated  al  fresco  and 
taking  th.eir  mate  from  a  single  bowl  that  circulates  round  and  round 
the  group  come  languid  calls  of  "Che  Maria!"  "Che  compadre!" 
"Che  Gringa !"  "Che"  is  the  popular  nickname  of  affection  or  fa- 
miliarity in  southern  South  America,  corresponding  roughly  to  our 
once  wide-spread  pseudonym  "kid." 

I  had  the  customary  santiagucfio  pleasure  of  rising  at  an  unearthly 
hour  to  catch  the  morning  train  to  La  Banda,  only  to  find  there  that 
the  "m.ixed"  daily  from  Buenos  Aires  into  the  sugar-fields  of  the  far 
north  was  seven  hours  late.  Over  the  way  stood  a  hotel  poetically 
named  "El  Dia  de  Nosotros,"  but  that  day  was  evidently  past,  for  the 
place  was  irrevocably  closed,  and  it  was  only  by  a  streak  of  luck  that 
long  after  my  customary  breakfast  hour  I  got  from  an  uninviting 
street  stand  a  cup  of  what  purported  to  be  black  coffee.  During  the 
delay  I  fell  into  conversation  with  two  young  Austrians  who  had  been 
all  the  way  up  to  Salta  in  quest  of  fortune.  The  best  chance  for 
work  they  had  found  was  at  cutting  sugar-cane  at  terms  under  which 
no  one  but  the  most  expert  could  earn  more  than  two  pesos  a  day. 


FAR  AND  WIDE  ON  THE  ARGENTINE  PAMPAS       57 

Much  as  it  resembles  our  own  land  in  some  ways,  the  Argentine  does 
not  give  one  the  imi)ression  of  being  any  such  Eldorado  for  the  new- 
comer whose  stock  in  trade  consists  solely  of  two  brawny  arms. 

The  mixto  crawled  in  at  last,  covered  with  a  thick  blanket  of  fine 
dust.  At  the  station  of  Araoz,  on  the  boundary  line  between  the 
provinces  of  Santiago  and  Tucuman,  the  sterile,  bushy  country  sud- 
denly gave  way  to  sugar-cane,  vast  fields,  veritable  prairies  of  cane, 
not  the  little  patches  of  light-green  that  dot  and  decorate  many  an 
Andean  landscape,  but  prosaic,  heavily  productive  stretches  as  unro- 
mantic  as  Iowa  cornfields,  spreading  as  far  as  the  eye  could  see  in  any 
direction.  Cutting  had  begun,  for  it  was  late  April,  and  all  the  way 
to  Tucuman  the  dull,  sullen  rumble  of  the  massive  rollers  was  as 
incessant  as  the  pungent  smell  of  molasses  in  the  air,  while  everywhere 
great  brick  stacks  rose  from  the  flat  green  landscape,  belching  forth 
their  heavy  clouds  of  smoke  on  the  hazy,  humid  atmosphere. 

Tucuman,  my  farthest  north  in  the  Argentine,  in  a  latitude  similar 
to  that  of  southern  Florida,  was  once  under  the  Inca,  though  the 
casual  observer  would  scarcely  suspect  of  any  such  past  this  bustling 
modern  Argentine  town  and  capital  of  the  smallest  yet  most  prosi:)erous 
province  of  the  republic.  It  is  a  town  that  lives,  breathes,  and  dreams 
sugar,  accepting  proudly  the  national  niclcname  of  the  "City-  of 
Sugar."  A  checkerboard  place,  some  of  its  wide  streets  paved  with 
wooden  blocks,  its  houses  of  the  old  Spanish  one-story  style,  yet  often 
seventy  or  eighty  meters  deep,  with  two  flowery  patios  hidden  away 
behind  the  bare,  though  gaily  smeared,  faqades,  it  has  mildly  the 
"feel"  of  the  tropics  intermingled  with  its  considerable  modern  ac- 
tivity. Electric  tramways  and  lights  are  very  much  in  evidence,  yet 
horsemen  resembling  those  of  the  Andean  wilds  may  be  seen  riding 
along  under  the  trolley  wires.  In  the  central  Plaza  de  la  Indepen- 
dencia  are  orange-trees  laden  with  ripe  fruit,  pepper-trees,  palms, 
and  cactus,  not  to  mention  a  highly  unsuccessful  marble  statue  of 
Liberty,  holding  in  her  hands  the  links  of  her  broken  chains  as  if 
they  were  considerably  too  hot  for  comfort.  About  this  never-failing 
civic  focus  are  the  government  buildings,  the  cathedral,  the  bishop's 
palace,  and  several  pretentious  clubs,  though  the  entire  circuit  brings 
to  view  no  architecture  of  interest.  In  one  of  several  other  squares  there 
is  a  statue  of  Belgrano,  who  defeated  the  Spaniards  in  this  vicinity 
in  1812  with  the  aid  of  "Our  Lady  of  Alercies,'"  whom  the  general 
rewarded  by  appointing  her  a  generalisimo  of  his  armies.  Near  the 
central  plaza,  surrounded  with  an  almost  religious  atmosphere,  is  In- 


58  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

dependence  Hall,  in  which  was  signed  what  amounts  to  Argentine's 
Declaration  of  Independence.  It  is  a  little  adobe  structure,  long  and 
low,  like  many  of  the  poor  men's  ranchos  scattered  about  the  pampas, 
carefully  whitewashed,  with  a  restored  wooden  roof  and  other  im- 
provements to  make  it  look  new  and  unnatural,  after  the  approved 
Latin-American  style  of  disguising  what  it  is  feared  may  be  taken  for 
the  commonplace.  All  this  is  covered  by  a  large  modern  concrete 
building  in  charge  of  a  chinita,  who  is  theoretically  always  on  hand 
to  admit  visitors  who  desire  to  see  the  two  good  bronze  reliefs,  the 
medals,  the  portraits  of  the  signers  of  the  declaration,  to  sit  down  in 
the  century-old  presidential  chair  long  enough  for  a  snapshot,  and  to 
add  their  autographs  to  the  register  locked  away  in. the  former  presi- 
dential desk,  in  approved  tourist  fashion.  From  Tucuman  one  can 
make  out  the  dim  blue  outline  of  the  lower  Andes  to  the  west,  and  in 
clear  sunny  weather  the  snow  peaks  of  Bolivia  stand  out  distinctly 
to  the  north.  Indeed,  it  is  within  the  district  embracing  Tucuman 
and  Santiago  del  Estero  that  Argentine  life  begins  to  shade  imper- 
ceptibly into  the  Bolivian  or  Andean. 

Virtually  the  entire  province  of  Tucuman  is  covered  with  sugar- 
cane and  orange  groves.  The  rivalry  between  these  two  products  has 
been  acute  for  decades,  now  one,  now  the  other  usurping  the  center 
of  the  stage.  Toward  the  end  of  the  last  century  the  northern  part  of 
the  republic  "went  sugar  crazy"  and  burned  whole  forests  of  orange- 
trees  in  order  to  plant  cane.  The  result  was  a  year  of  overproduction, 
the  only  period  in  which  the  Argentine  exported  sugar,  though  she 
should  easily  be  able  to  supply  half  South  America.  On  the  contrary 
she  habitually  imports  sugar,  her  own  in  many  cases,  for  the  crude 
sugar  shipped  to  Europe  is  often  the  very  sugar  which  was  served  in 
tissue-wrapped  lumps  in  nearly  every  restaurant  and  lechcria  of 
Buenos  Aires  long  before  that  sanitary  provision  was  thought  of  in 
the  United  States.  But  then,  so  does  the  Argentine  import  garlic,  and 
onions,  peppers,  garhanzos  (the  Spanish  chickpeas  of  which  she  is 
still  so  fond),  cheese,  and  millions  of  "fresh"  eggs,  not  only  from 
Uruguay  across  the  river  but  from  Spain  and  Portugal  across  the  sea, 
though  all  these  commodities  might  easily  be  produced  at  home. 
Sugar  pays  what  we  would  consider  a  heavy  internal  duty,  which  is 
reputed  to  be  one  of  the  causes  why  there  are  so  few  national  re- 
fineries. In  her  one  year  of  overproduction  Tucuman  province  gave 
the  country  nearly  twice  the  sugar  it  could  consume.  The  terrified 
planters  banded  together  to  build  up  the  export  trade,  got  a  bounty 


FAR  AND  WTDL:  ON  THE  ARGENTINE  PAMPAS       59 

from  the  federal  government,  which  was  later  forbidden  by  the  Brus- 
sels convention,  and  forced  the  provincial  government  to  pass  a  law 
limiting  sugar  plantations.  In  carrying  this  out  the  tucumanos,  who 
had  burned  forests  of  orange-trees  a  few  years  before  to  jjlant  cane, 
now  burned  square  leagues  of  cane-liekls  that  were  producing  too 
generously.  The  government  indemnified  the  men  who  fired  their 
fields  and  furnished  them  free  seeds  of  corn,  wheat,  and  barley  with 
which  to  replant  them.  But  in  time  the  pendulum  swung  back  again 
and  to-day  the  ])rovince  has  little  interest  in  anything  but  sugar. 

Tucuman  retains  none  of  the  primitive  methods  by  which  cane  is 
turned  into  brown  lumps  of  panela  or  chancaca  on  the  little  plantations 
scattered  through  the  Andes.  Some  sixty  immense  cngcnios  grind  in- 
cessantly during  the  rather  short  but  exceedingly  busy  season.  The 
capacity  of  many  of  these  mills  is  large,  though  they  work  less  than 
those  of  Cuba.  These,  and  the  often  enormous  estates  about  them, 
are  in  most  cases  owned  by  English  or  other  foreign  firms,  the  Ameri- 
can being  most  conspicuous  by  his  absence.  Not  only  are  we  un- 
represented in  ownership  but  in  the  machinery  used,  which  is  with 
rare  exceptions  British,  P>ench,  Belgian,  and  German,  for  the  ar~ 
gcntino  seems  to  have  an  instinct  which  draws  him  toward  Europe 
and  causes  him  to  avoid  all  unnecessary  contact  with  what  he  calls 
the  "North  American.''  It  is  not  that  he  fears  the  "Collosus  of 
the  North,"  like  so  many  of  the  smaller,  bad-boy  republics  nearer  the 
Gulf  of  Mexico,  rather  is  he  firmly  convinced  that  his  country  is  as 
powerful  and  self-sufficient  as  our  own,  but  he  is  inclined  by  tem- 
perament and  custom  to  turn  his  eyes  eastward  rather  than  north- 
ward. 

In  this  busy  season  of  the  Argentine  autumn  and  winter  Tucuman 
province  is  a  hive  of  activity.  Thousands  of  workmen  of  many  races 
are  scattered  among  the  horseman-high  plants  which  stretch  to  the 
horizon  in  every  direction,  slashing  off  the  canes  at  the  ground,  clear- 
ing them  of  leaves  and  useless  top  with  a  few  quick  swings  of  the 
machete,  and  tossing  them  with  graceful  easy  gesture  upon  piles  often 
several  meters  away.  Along  the  wide  and  soft  dirt  roads  which  cut 
into  squares  the  dense  jungles  of  cane,  there  is  a  constant  stream  of 
cumbersome  two-wheeled  carts,  usually  drawn  by  five  mules,  the 
mcztizo  driver  in  his  ragged  garments  and  soiled,  broad-brimmed  hat 
astride  the  off  hind  animal,  as  they  strain  toward  the  points  of  con- 
centration. There  the  load  is  weighed  and  lifted  in  a  single  bundle 
by  huge  cranes  which  are  the  only  American  contribution  to  the  aver- 


6o  WORKING  I,'ORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

age  estate,  and  dropped  into  the  cars  of  the  private  railroads  that  criss- 
cross all  the  province,  or  directly  into  the  carriers  that  feed  the  three 
sets  of  mammoth  inexorable  rollers.  The  bagasa  left  over  from  the 
crushing  is  burned  at  once  in  the  mill  engines,  along  with  the  wood 
brought  in  from  constantly  increasing  distances ;  the  mosta,  or  sac- 
charine residue  so  poor  and  dirty  that  it  will  not  produce  even  the 
lowest  of  the  three  grades  of  unrefined  sugar,  is  turned  into  alcohol. 
Every  important  factory  has  a  village  clustered  about  it,  a  community 
complete  from  bakers  to  priest.  Field  workers  have  an  unalienable 
right  to  the  two  finest  canes  they  cut  or  load  during  the  day,  and  at 
dusk  long  broken  lines  of  them  may  be  seen  returning  from  the  fields 
carrying  their  poles  over  one  shoulder,  like  homeward  bound  fisher- 
men, or  seated  on  the  ground,  machete  in  hand,  peeling  the  cane  and 
cutting  it  into  sections,  to  thrust  these  in  their  mouths,  crush  and 
suck  them,  and  spit  them  out  upon  the  earth  about  them. 

No  traveler  with  a  bit  of  time  to  spare  should  leave  the  Argentine 
without  visiting  her  chief  "holy  place,"  presided  over  by  La  Virgen 
de  Lujdn.  If  we  are  to  believe  all  we  are  told,  it  is  this  patron  saint 
who  has  made  the  Argentine  the  prosperous,  happy  land  it  is  to-day. 
To  her  groups  of  pious  women,  headed  by  the  archbishop,  made  pil- 
grimage from  Buenos  Aires  when  the  bill  of  the  new  socialist  depu- 
ties threatened  to  become  a  divorce  law ;  to  her  the  country  turns  when 
its  gets  too  much,  or  too  little,  rain ;  here  the  Irish- A r gent inos  gather 
en  masse  on  St.  Patrick's  day. 

Genuine  pilgrims  are  expected  to  fast  on  the  day  they  visit  Lujan. 
We — for  a  friend  made  the  journey  with  me — came  nearly  carrying 
out  this  requirement  in  spite  of  ourselves,  having  missed  the  train  we 
planned  to  take  and  unwisely  set  out  on  foot  without  waiting  for  the 
next.  For  once  outside  the  city  limits,  it  is  a  long  way  from  Buenos 
Aires  to  the  next  shop  or  restaurant.  Lujan  is  something  more  than 
forty  miles  west  of  the  capital,  the  usual  "boliche"  town  of  the  pam- 
pas and  a  slough  of  mud  in  this  autumn  season,  the  unfinished  dull- 
red  brick  "basilica"  bulking  high  above  it  and  visible  many  miles  away. 
The  legend,  which  still  finds  a  surprisingly  large  number  of  believers 
in  the  Argentine,  runs  that  in  the  time  of  the  Spanish  dominion  a  com- 
munity of  Spanish  monks  set  out  with  great  ceremony  to  transport 
a  statue  of  the  Virgin  from  Buenos  Aires  to  Peru.  Arrived  at  the  ham- 
let of  Lujan,  the  cart  in  which  it  was  being  carried  stopped.  Nothing 
could  induce  it  to  move  on.  No  doubt  it  was  the  rainy  season  and 
there  was  excellent  reason  for  its  immovability,  but  the  good  monks 


FAR  AND  WIDE  ON  THE  ARGENTINE  PAMPAS       6i 

concluded  that  the  Virgin  was  expressing  a  desire  to  remain  where 
she  was,  and  her  wishes  were  respected.  A  small  chapel  was  erected 
and  her  cult  perpetuated.  When  immigration  increased  and  swarms 
of  devout  Italians,  not  to  mention  the  Spanish  and  Irish,  began  to 
settle  in  the  vicinity  and  make  frequent  pilgrimages  to  the  shrine,  the 
bishop  in  charge  took  it  as  an  indication  that  the  powers  of  a  better 
world  wished  the  Virgin  to  be  housed  in  a  building  befitting  her  in- 
creasing popularity.  He  undertook  the  erection,  from  popular  sub- 
scriptions, of  a  "Gothic  cathedral"  which  should  be  the  most  imposing 
in  the  Argentine,  though  this,  to  be  sure,  is  not  saying  much.  It  was 
planned  to  spend  six  million  pesos,  half  of  which  are  already  gone, 
and  as  soon  as  the  walls  had  been  raised  the  bishop  insisted  on  open- 
ing the  building,  which  perhaps  is  why  there  is  so  little  suggestion  of 
Gothic  about  the  bare  brick,  towerless,  fagadeless,  on  the  whole  dismal 
structure. 

Though  we  might  be  willing  to  fast,  when  there  was  no  choice  in 
the  matter,  not  all  the  patron  saints  on  the  globe  could  have  forced  us 
to  wallow  through  the  mile  or  more  of  black  mud  between  the  station 
and  the  "basilica."  For  that  matter,  we  noted  that  even  the  pious  pil- 
grims who  had  arrived  with  us  in  their  gleaming  patent-leather  shoes 
climbed  unhesitatingly  into  the  comfortable,  if  tiny,  horsecar,  and  that 
not  one  of  them  gave  a  suggestion  of  dropping  off  to  finish  the  journey 
on  his  knees,  or  even  on  foot.  We  were  no  less  astounded,  if  secretly 
more  pleased,  to  find  that  one  of  the  rascals  keeping  the  restaurants 
tucked  away  among  the  many  santcrias,  shops  in  which  are  sold  tin 
"saints"  which  los  iieles  may  carry  home  to  perform  their  cures  by 
hand,  was  willing  to  jeopardize  our  future  salvation  by  providing  us, 
l)efore  we  had  consummated  the  object  of  every  visit  to  Lujan,  with 
as  much  of  a  repast  as  one  learns  to  hope  for  in  an  Argentine  "boliche" 
town. 

Inside  the  unfinished  but  already  richly  decorated  "basilica"  the 
curved-stone  back  of  the  altar  and  the  stairway  rising  above  it  was 
already  carved  with  the  names  of  those  who  credited  the  Virgin  with 
curing  them  of  incurable  ailments.  There  were  other  less  conspicuous 
places  for  similar  testimonials  from  those  with  less  mesmerism  over 
the  root  of  evil.  About  the  altar  were  gathered  groups  of  pilgrims 
engaged  in  the  preliminary'  formalities  of  the  faithful  who  come  seek- 
ing aid.  Peasants  still  wearing  the  garb  of  Lombardy  or  Piedmont, 
and  no  doubt  come  to  ask  the  Virgin  for  a  little  less  rain  and  a  bet- 
ter price  for  their  corn,  that  they  might  buy  the  coveted  piece  of  land 


62  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

next  their  own  or  send  more  money  to  the  old  people  they  had  left  be- 
hind in  Italy,  mingled  with  richly  garbed  Portcnas  who  were  praying 
perhaps  for  motherhood  or  the  welfare  of  a  lover. 

"But  where  is  the  statue?"  asked  my  unpious  companion  of  a  young 
priest  who  was  marching  back  and  forth  committing  to  memory  some 
password  to  heaven. 

"Why — er,"  gasped  the  startled  ecclesiastic,  "do  you  mean  the 
Blessed  Virgin?" 

"Yes,"  returned  my  companion,  carelessly. 

"Follow  those  broad  curving  stairs  and  you  will  find  our  Blessed 
Lady  of  Lujan  in  that  little  room  above  the  altar,"  replied  the  horri- 
fied youth,  crossing  himself  fervently. 

Above  we  found  a  single  worshipper,  a  working  woman  dressed  in 
the  most  nearly  whole  and  spotless  gown  she  possessed,  kneeling  on 
the  marble  floor,  to  which  she  bowed  her  forehead  now  and  then,  her 
eyes  fixed  on  a  doll  some  two  feet  high  overdressed  in  heavy  gilded 
robes  and  covered  with  bracelets,  necklaces  and  girdles  of  false  pearls 
and  diamonds — for  the  real  ones,  worth  a  king's  ransom,  are  deposited 
in  a  safety  vault  in  Buenos  Aires  and  are  used  only  on  the  anniversary 
of  the  Virgin's  halt  in  Lujan.  Back  of  the  woman  her  son  of  five  was 
climbing  high  up  the  iron  grill  surrounding  the  chapel,  in  his  own  par- 
ticular effort  to  reach  heaven.  I  lifted  him  down  before  he  broke 
his  neck,  whereupon  he  sidled  over  to  the  lunch-basket  the  pair  had 
brought  with  them  and,  keeping  a  weather  eye  on  his  devout  parent, 
stealthily  drew  out  a  quart  bottle  of  wine  wrapped  in  a  newspaper. 
Setting  his  teeth  in  the  protruding  cork,  he  tugged  at  it  for  some 
time,  like  a  puppy  at  a  root,  drew  it  at  last,  and  with  an  eye  still  on  his 
mother,  deep  in  her  communing  with  the  Virgin,  gulped  down  nearly 
half  a  liter,  recorked  the  bottle,  and  slipped  it  back  into  its  place. 

On  the  way  down  we  halted  to  speak  with  a  well-dressed  warden, 
who  assured  us  that  he  had  personally  known  of  "thousands  of  super- 
natural cures"  performed  by  the  Virgin  of  Lujan. 

"Why,"  he  cried,  growing  more  specific,  "I  have  known  many  rich 
ladies  to  come  out  here  from  Buenos  Aires  on  crutches,  make  a 
promise  to  our  Blessed  Virgin  and  go  back  home  and — and  by  and  by 
they  would  send  out  the  crutches  as  proof  of  being  cured,  and  perhaps 
a  diamond  necklace  to  show  their  gratitude  to  Our  Lady.  There  is 
no  ailment  that  Our  Lady  cannot  cure." 

"Curious,"  I  mused,  "but  as  I  came  in  I  noticed  just  outside  the 


FAR  AND  WIDE  ON  THE  ARGENTINE  PAMPAS       63 

gates  four  beggars, — a  blind  woman,  a  one-legged  man,  a  man  without 
legs,  and  a  paralytic." 

"Ah,  esa  gente !  That  class  of  people !"  cried  the  warden,  with 
a  world  of  disgust  in  his  voice  and  a  deprecatory  shrug  of  the 
shoulders. 


CHAPTER  IV 


OVER  THE  ANDES  TO  CHILE 


IT  was  with  keen  regret  that  I  cut  myself  off  from  Uncle  Sam's 
modest  bounty  when  the  time  came  to  set  out  on  a  journey  that 
was  to  carry  me  outside  the  Argentine  and  beyond  the  jurisdiction 
of  our  overworked  consulate.  But  with  a  handful  of  gold  sovereigns 
to  show  for  my  exertions  in  running  errands  and  eluding  Porteho 
prices,  the  day  seemed  at  hand  for  continuing  my  intensive  tour  of 
South  America.  The  "International,"  of  the  "Buenos  Aires  al  Pacifico" 
leaves  the  capital  three  times  a  week  on  what  purports  to  be  a  trip 
clear  across  the  continent.  In  spirit  its  assertion  is  truthful,  for  though 
the  "International"  itself  halts  where  the  Argentine  begins  to  tilt  up 
into  the  Andes,  other  trains  connect  with  it  and  one  can,  with  good 
luck  and  ample  wealth,  reach  Santiago  de  Chile,  or  Valparaiso  on  the 
Pacific,  thirty-six  hours  after  bidding  the  Portcfios  farewell. 

On  a  crisp  May  morning  I  set  out  westward  from  "B.A.,"  lying 
featureless  and  yellow-white  in  the  brilliant  early-winter  sunshine,  not 
a  church  spire,  scarcely  a  factory  chimney,  though  many  unsightly 
American  windmills,  rising  above  its  monotonous  level.  The  heavy 
"Hmited"  train  made  scarcely  half  a  dozen  stops  all  day,  though  no 
extraordinary  speed.  At  the  rare  stations  a  few  passengers  hastened 
to  enter  or  leave  the  cars ;  between  them  trees  and  windmills  rose  or 
receded  hull-down  over  the  horizon  of  the  dreary  pampas.  Outside 
each  uninspiring  town  was  an  ostentatious  city  of  the  dead;  in  the 
sodden  fields  were  flocks  of  sheep,  cattle,  and  horses,  fat  as  barrels, 
some  snorting  away  at  sight  of  the  train,  others  gazing  disdainfully 
after  it.  In  many  places  the  pampa  was  flooded,  sometimes  for  miles, 
the  shallow  temporary  lakes  dotted  with  wild  ducks,  the  roads  mere 
rivers  of  mud,  with  only  the  tops  of  the  fence-posts  out  of  water,  in 
which  dismal  looking  animals  were  huddled  up  to  their  bellies,  or 
crowded  together  on  little  muddy  islands.  Many  mud  houses  were 
half  under  water,  their  thatched  roofs  and  adobe  walls  turned  into 
velvety  green  lawns;  hay-stacks  had  grown  verdant  with  sprouting 
grass ;  several  pairs  of  horses  dragging  along  the  churned  roads  a  load 

64 


OVER  THE  ANDES  TO  CHILE  65 

of  baled  alfalfa  was  one  of  the  rare  signs  of  activity.  Even  the 
nanducs  seemed  to  have  fled  to  some  modern  Ararat. 

Farther  west  the  country  was  somewhat  drier,  or  at  least  more 
often  above  water.  Here  the  vast  pampa  was  divided  by  wire  fences, 
producing  the  illusion  of  an  immense  cobweb,  broken  only  rarely 
by  a  dense  blue  grove  of  eucalyptus  trees  planted  about  the  central 
house  of  an  enormous  cstancia,  estates  in  most  cases  too  large  for 
the  economic  health  of  the  country.  Up  to  recent  years  the  great  mis- 
take of  the  Argentine  government  was  to  grant  mammoth  tracts  of 
land  to  men  who  quickly  became  so  wealthy  that  they  moved  to  pri- 
vate palaces  in  the  capital,  leaving  little  or  nothing  for  the  homesteads 
of  what  might  be  a  host  of  productive  freehold  farmers.  The  rail- 
way company  is  striving  to  get  these  huge  estates  broken  up,  encour- 
aging colonization  by  offering  prizes  for  the  best  crops  along  its  lines, 
as  well  as  special  inducements  of  transportation.  For  much  of  the 
region  through  which  the  "Buenos  Aires  al  Pacifico"  runs  is  so  thinly 
populated  that,  as  in  some  of  our  western  states,  the  common  carrier 
is  forced  to  help  produce  something  to  carry.  But  the  big  landed  pro- 
prietors have  a  Spanish  pride  in  the  size  of  their  holdings,  and  wath 
it  an  abhorrence  not  only  of  manual  labor  but  even  of  living  on 
their  estates,  from  which  the  income  is  large  enough  for  their  com- 
fort under  the  poorest  systems  of  farming,  or  mere  grazing,  and  it  is 
not  easy  to  induce  them  to  sell  even  those  portions  lying  wholly  idle. 
The  company  has  various  ways  of  combatting  this  attitude.  The 
most  common  is  to  build  stations  only  where  wealthy  estancieros  do- 
nate not  merely  the  land  needed  for  immediate  use,  but  room  for 
future  railroad  development  and  sometimes  for  the  building  of  a  vil- 
lage and  the  beginning  of  more  intensive  agriculture  about  it. 

A  few  of  these  have  developed  into  true  frontier  towns,  with  enor- 
mously wide  mud  streets  and  electric  lights,  stretching  far  out  into 
the  country,  as  if  the  inhabitants  expected  to  wake  up  any  morning 
and  find  the  place  trebled  in  population.  They  were  like  a  country 
without  a  history, — prosperous,  contented — and  uninteresting.  There 
being  almost  no  stone  or  wood  all  the  way  from  the  Cordoba  hills  to 
Tierra  del  Fucgo,  it  was  not  strange  that  the  majority  even  of  town 
houses  were  made  of  the  only  material  at  hand,  mud,  as  the  Esquimaux 
build  of  snow  and  ice;  yet  the  most  dismal  of  these  structures  were 
by  no  means  the  comfortless  dens  of  the  Indians  and  cliolos  of  the 
Andes.  It  was  Sunday,  and  especially  on  that  day  is  it  the  custom 
in  the  smaller  provincial  towns  to  hacer  el  corso,  to  parad*^  back  and 


66  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

forth,  at  the  station  at  train-time.  Groups  of  comely  girls,  well  dressed 
for  such  districts,  powdered  and  perfumed,  with  flowers  in  their 
hair,  their  arms  interlocked,  were  not  content  to  display  their  charms 
to  their  rustic  fellow-townsmen  outside  the  station  barriers,  but  in- 
vaded the  platforms  and  strolled  from  end  to  end  of  the  train  as  long 
as  it  remained.  As  attractive  members  of  the  fair  sex  are  never  with' 
out  their  attendant  groups  of  admirers  in  South  America,  the  latter 
increased  the  platform  throng  to  a  point  where  it  was  a  lucky  traveler 
who  could  find  room  to  descend  and  make  his  way  across  it. 

For  long  distances  there  were  almost  no  signs  of  animate  life  ex- 
cept occasional  flocks  of  iiandiies  cantering  away  like  awkward  school- 
girls. About  every  holiche,  country  store  and  liquor  shop,  were  groups 
of  shaggy  pampa  ponies  and  their  no  less  shaggy  riders,  the  animals 
prevented  from  deserting  their  owners  by  rawhide  thongs  binding 
their  front  feet  together.  Bombachas,  the  bloomer-like  nether  gar- 
ments of  the  pampas,  were  much  in  evidence  among  these  modern 
gauclios.  A  few  of  these,  no  doubt,  were  independent  farmers;  the 
majority  were  plainly  hired  men  whose  greatest  likeness  to  the  hardy 
part-Indian  cowboys  of  a  generation  ago  is  the  ability  to  absorb  some 
five  pounds  of  meat  a  day,  washing  it  down  with  copious  draughts  of 
boiling  mate.  Vegetables  are  as  little  grown  in  the  Argentine  as  in 
most  of  South  America,  and  the  employees,  only  the  mayordomos 
and  the  pen-driving  class  missing,  who  gather  daily  about  the  asado 
provided  by  the  estanciero,  still  live  almost  entirely  on  meat,  with  oc- 
casionally a  few  hardtack  galletas  from  these  pampa  stores.  Boys  of 
seven  or  eight,  with  true  gaucho  blood  in  their  veins,  who  sat  their 
horses  as  if  they  were  part  of  them,  galloped  about  some  of  these 
smaller  towns,  holeando  cats  and  dogs  with  astonishing  skill.  At  the 
more  important  crossings  an  old  man  or  woman,  sometimes  a  little 
girl,  stood  waving  as  solemnly  as  if  the  whole  future  of  the  railroad 
depended  upon  them  the  black-and-yellow  flag  that  means  "all  safe" 
to  Argentine  trainmen.  Country  policemen  were  almost  numerous, 
riding  along  the  miserable  roads  or  dismounted  at  the  stations,  covered 
with  dust  or  mud  and  mingling  with  the  hardy,  independent  country- 
men. The  rural  Argentine  police  still  have  a  far  from  enviable  repu- 
tation, though  they  no  longer  tyrannize  over  the  new  style  of  argentino 
as  they  once  did  over  the  bold  but  unsophisticated  gaucho  of  the  "Mar- 
tin Fierro"  type.  Yet  on  the  whole  they  were  not  a  body  of  men  to 
inspire  confidence.  One  felt  at  a  glance  that,  far  from  trusting  to 
their  protection,  it  would  be  better  to  have  someone  else  along  in  the 


OVER  THE  ANDES  TO  CHILE  67 

more  lonely  sections  of  the  country  to  protect  one  from  the  police. 

Mendoza,  metropolis  of  western  Argentine  and  capital  of  the  pro- 
vince of  the  same  name,  lies  at  the  very  base  of  the  Andes,  six  hundred 
miles  inland  from  Buenos  Aires  and  barely  one  fourth  as  far  from 
t^ie  Pacific,  though  with  the  mighty  Andean  wall  intervening.  Built 
on  plentiful  flat  ground  in  what  is  sometimes  called  the  "Argentine 
California,"  the  city  is  laid  out  in  wide  checkerboard  streets,  some 
of  them  shaded  by  rows  of  magnificent  trees  of  abundant  foliage. 
Each  street  is  bordered  with  ditches  made  of  mosaics  of  small  cob- 
bles, for  the  torrents  that  pour  down  from  the  Andes  at  certain  seasons 
are  worthy  of  man's  attention,  and  though  the  town  is  not  tropical, 
banana,  acacia,  and  mulberry  trees  bathe  their  feet  in  these  intermittent 
streams  and  take  on  an  extraordinary  vigor.  The  central  section  has 
a  number  of  modern  business  buildings,  but  the  dwellings  are  nearly 
all  still  in  the  old  Spanish  style,  often  large  houses,  but  capacious 
chiefly  in  depth,  so  that  one  only  half  suspects  the  several  flowery 
patios  they  inclose.  Few  buildings  are  of  more  than  one  story,  and 
even  the  stylish  habitations,  with  columned  fagades  and  corrcdores 
paved  with  colored  marble  dalles,  are  made  of  mud  baked  with  straw 
and  lime.  For  Mendoza  still  remembers  the  days,  sixty  years  ago, 
when  an  earthquake  destroyed  the  entire  town,  burying  nearly  the 
whole  population  of  ten  thousand  in  the  ruins.  Nothing  remains  now 
of  the  old  town  except  the  ruins  of  a  church  or  two  that  are  preserved 
as  historical  souvenirs  and  warnings  against  high  buildings,  mere 
masses  of  bricks  standing  like  monoliths  on  the  summits  of  walls  that 
seem  ever  ready  to  fall  down  and  on  which  a  bush  or  a  plant  has 
here  and  there  taken  root ;  yet  the  mcndocinos  are  only  beginning  to 
put  their  faith  in  reinforced  concrete.  Many  of  the  houses  are  smeared 
pink,  saflFron,  blue,  or  other  bright  color,  and  when  it  rains  the  mud 
roofs  run  down  over  the  faqades,  streaking  the  colors  or  washing 
them  out  to  a  leprous  gray. 

Being  almost  entirely  a  one-story  town,  and  retaining  the  Moorish 
style  of  architecture,  even  the  hotels  of  Mendoza  have  no  windows 
on  the  streets,  the  only  openings  to  the  rooms  being  the  door  on  the 
patio,  so  that  the  guest  who  needs  a  bit  of  light  must  disclose  to  serv- 
ants and  fellow-clients  all  his  domestic  activities;  and  to  reach  the 
bathroom,  if  there  is  one,  means  parading  the  entire  length  of  the 
courtyard.  Sidewalk  cafes  are  thronged  even  on  "winter"  evenings; 
as  elsewhere  in  the  Argentine,  every  working-man's  restaurant  has  its 
cancha  de  bochas,  a  kind  of  earth-floored  bowling-alley  native  to  rural 


68  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Italy.  There  are  electric  street-cars,  and  the  electric  lights,  outdoors 
and  in,  outdo  our  own  in  size  and  brilliancy.  While  the  English  own 
the  important  Argentine  railroads,  Germans  hold  most  of  the  con- 
cessions for  electric  light  and  power  in  the  provincial  towns,  and  Men- 
doza  is  no  exception  to  this  rule. 

The  modern  argcntino  is  not  only  a  transplanted  European,  but  in 
most  cases  has  come  over  within  the  past  century.  Only  Caucasian  im- 
migration is  welcome,  no  negroes  and  none  of  the  yellow  races  being 
admitted.  As  in  Buenos  Aires,  there  is  in  the  capital  of  each  province 
an  immigration  bureau,  with  attendants  speaking  the  principal  tongues 
of  Europe,  which  strives  to  place  the  newcomer  to  his  and  the  coun- 
try's advantage.  Thus  there  is  a  decidedly  European  atmosphere  even 
in  towns  as  far  back  in  the  depths  of  America  as  Mendoza,  one  that 
all  but  obliterates  the  purely  American  aspect.  The  city  retains  a 
suggestion  of  Spanish  colonial  days,  but  the  native  bombachas  are  no 
more  familiar  sights  than  the  Basque  cap  of  the  Pyrenees  and  the 
hemp-sole  sandals,  the  short  blouse  with  wide  sash  of  contrasting 
color,  and  the  clean-shaven  features  of  the  hardy  Spanish  peasant  and 
arriero. 

Like  several  of  the  more  important  cities  far  distant  from  the  fed- 
eral capital,  Mendoza  enjoys  a  certain  local  autonomy,  though  the 
prevailing  political  party  in  the  Argentine  advocates  a  strongly  cen- 
tralized government  more  nearly  like  that  of  France  than  that  in  the 
United  States.  The  province  prints  its  own  small  money,  legal  tender 
only  within  its  limits,  for  the  national  currency  not  only  becomes 
scarcer  but  more  and  more  ragged  and  illegible  in  ratio  to  the  distance 
from  Buenos  Aires.  A  not  entirely  unjustified  fear  of  revolution, 
too,  causes  the  province  to  maintain  a  large  police  force,  for  the  Ar- 
gentine has  nothing  like  our  National  Guard.  It  is  easy  for  the  fed- 
eral government,  often  looking  for  just  such  a  chance,  to  intervene 
at  the  first  suggestion  of  trouble  in  a  province,  and  as  such  interven- 
tion means  a  suspended  governor,  a  legislature  forced  out  of  office,  and 
the  loss  of  nearly  all  political  patronage,  the  provincial  authorities  find 
it  to  their  advantage  to  have  a  dependable  police  force.  Persis-tent 
rumor  has  it  that  the  police  of  Mendoza,  however,  are  far  from  per- 
fect, that  they  lose  few  opportunities  to  force  bribes  from,  and  other- 
wise tyrannize  over,  the  population.  Many  fines  may  legally  be  im- 
posed and  collected  directly  by  the  police,  and  the  story  runs  that  it  is 
particularly  unfortunate  to  attract  their  attention  toward  the  end  of 
the  month.    They  are  then  apt  to  be  penniless,  and  are  given  to  wan- 


OVKR  THE  ANDES  TO  CHILE  69 

dering  the  streets  after  dark,  seeking  whom  they  may  run  in  and  threaten 
to  lock  up  if  he  does  not  at  once  pay  the  "fine"  then  and  there  levied 
by  the  police.  H  the  victim  asks  for  a  receipt,  rumor  adds,  he  is  in- 
stantly clapped  into  jail,  or  rather,  is  sent  to  stand  all  night  or  sit  down 
in  mud  in  the  prison  yard.  Even  important  citizens  of  Mendoza 
hesitate  to  go  out  alone  after  dark  at  the  end  of  the  month. 

I  spent  May  twenty-fifth,  the  Argentine  Independence  Day,  in  Men- 
doza. An  official  salute  woke  the  town  at  sunrise,  to  find  itself  al- 
ready fluttering  with  flags,  the  blue-and-white  Argentine  banner  pre- 
dominating, but  with  many  others,  the  yellow-and-red  of  Spain  in  par- 
ticular— and  one  lone  Stars  and  Stripes,  in  front  of  a  sewing-machine 
agency.  The  uninformed  stranger  might  have  suspected  that  there  is 
more  patriotism  to  the  square  yard  in  the  Argentine  than  in  any  other 
land.  Had  he  inquired  a  bit,  however,  he  would  have  learned  that  the 
law  requires  all  inhabitants — not  merely  citizens,  be  it  noted — to  fly  the 
national  flag  on  May  25  and  July  9,  as  it  requires  all  men  to  uncover 
when  the  national  anthem  is  played,  and  all  school  children  to  learn 
by  rote  certain  chauvinistic  platitudes.  Nor  should  the  fact  be  over- 
looked that  the  "Veinticinco  de  Mayo" — for  which  Argentine  towns, 
streets,  shops,  cafes,  and  even  dogs  are  named — is  perilously  near 
the  end  of  the  month. 

In  the  morning  everyone  went  to  church,  from  white-haired  gen- 
erals lop-shouldered  with  the  weight  of  the  gleaming  hardware  across 
their  chests  to  newly-rich  Spaniards  who  still  wore  shoes  with  less 
ease  than  they  would  have  cloth  alfargatas.  Scores  of  police,  dozens 
of  firemen,  still  wearing  their  hats  or  helmets,  as  is  the  custom  through- 
out South  America,  lined  the  aisles  from  entrance  to  altar.  When 
all  the  elite  and  high  government  ofScials  had  gathered,  the  archbishop 
himself  preached  a  sermon  founded  on  the  not  wholly  unique  asser- 
tion that  politicians  seek  government  places  for  their  own  good  rather 
than  for  that  of  the  governed,  ending  with  the  warning  that  the 
Argentine  was  sliding  pellmell  to  perdition  because  the  teaching  of  tlie 
Catholic  religion  is  not  permitted  in  the  public  schools.  The  governor 
of  the  province  lent  an  attentive  ear  throughout  this  harangue,  and 
watched  the  service  with  attentive  Latin-American  politeness;  but  it 
was  noticeable  that  he  did  not  show  enthusiasm,  and  that  no  cere- 
mony was  included  that  required  kneeling  or  crossing  oneself  on  the 
part  of  the  congregation,  for  Argentine  government  officials  are  often 
noted  for  their  anticlerical  attitude.     There  was  an  entirely  different 


70  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

atmosphere  here  than  at  the  Te  Deum  I  had  attended  on  Colombia's 
Independence  Day  two  3'ears  before  in  cloistered  Bogota. 

The  municipal  band  met  us  outside  the  cathedral  and  led  the  parade 
of  police  and  firemen — marching  like  men  long  accustomed  to  drilling 
- — of  citizens  and  ecclesiastics,  the  archbishop,  still  in  his  purple,  sur- 
rounded by  a  guard  of  honor  with  drawn  bayonets.  The  procession 
broke  up  at  the  entrance  to  the  Parque  del  Oeste,  said  to  be  the  largest 
city  park  in  South  America.  Miniature  trains,  astride  which  human 
beings  look  gigantic,  carried  those  who  did  not  care  to  walk,  or  hire 
other  transportation,  out  to  this  extensive  civic  improvement,  spread- 
ing over  all  the  landscape  at  the  base  of  the  Andes  to  the  west  of  the 
city.  The  crowning  feature  of  this  enormous  new  park,  with  an  ar- 
tificial lake  nearly  a  mile  long,  concrete  grandstands,  and  broad  shaded 
avenues,  is  a  solid  rock  rising  from  the  plain  on  which  the  city  is 
built,  the  first  outpost  of  the  Andes  that  bulk  into  the  heavens  close 
behind  it.  The  entire  top  of  this  hill,  reached  by  a  roadway  cut  in  a 
complete  circuit  of  it,  has  been  blasted  off,  and  on  this  great  platform 
has  been  reared  a  gigantic  creation  of  granite  and  bronze  called  "The 
Armies  of  the  Andes,"  It  commemorates  the  passage  of  the  Andes 
by  San  Martin's  troops  early  in  the  last  century  to  free  Chile  from 
Spanish  rule,  one  of  the  most  heroic  expeditions  in  American  history, — 
a  badly  equipped,  half  starved  force  struggling  through  snow-blocked 
passes  on  what  seemed  then  an  almost  quixotic  mission.  Yet  the  con- 
ception and  execution  of  the  monument,  magnificent  in  proportions, 
rarely  surpassed  in  dignity,  is  worthy  of  its  subject.  Behind  and  above 
the  splendid  equestrian  statue  of  San  Martin  are  his  officers  and  the 
army  of  liberation,  ranging  all  the  way  from  low  relief  to  detached 
figures,  the  whole  surmounted  by  an  enormous  winged  victory,  while 
around  the  monument  hover  huge  bronze  condors.  All  this,  be  it  noted, 
was  planned  and  carried  out  by  a  provincial  town  of  fifty  thousand 
inhabitants.  Of  the  view  to  be  had  from  it,  on  one  side  the  plains  of 
the  Argentine,  fiat  as  a  motionless  sea,  on  the  other  this  same  plain, 
bursting  suddenly  into  mountains,  which  climb  in  more  and  more 
jagged  formation  to  the  snow-clad  summits  of  the  Andes  almost  sheer 
overhead,  mere  words  are  but  weak  symbols  to  describe. 

Meanwhile  the  excellent  municipal  band  had  been  playing  all  the 
afternoon  in  a  kiosk  nearer  the  park  entrance.  Soon  after  noonday 
we  low-caste  promenaders  on  foot  had  begun  to  gather  about  it ;  then 
a  few  poor  public  vehicles  took  to  ambling  around  it ;  better  and  bet- 
ter carriages  appeared,  with  coachmen  in  high  hats  and  livery;  finally 


OVER  THE  ANDES  TO  CHILE  71 

private  automobiles,  large  and  gleamingly  new,  joined  the  now  crowded 
cortege.  Pedestrians  had  become  too  many  lor  free  movement ;  the 
carriages  and  automobiles  circled  in  unbroken  procession  farther  and 
farther  out  on  the  horseshoe-shaped  drive,  until  each  heard  only  oc- 
casional snatches  of  the  music  as  they  passed  near  it.  A  few  silk-clad 
ladies  and  their  i)erfumed  escorts  deigned  to  descend  and  stroll  a  bit. 
Policemen  on  magnificent  horses,  white  plumes  waving  from  their 
helmets,  directed  the  traffic  with  princely  gestures.  By  dusk  all  Men- 
doza  was  there,  every  class  of  society  from  the  proud  hidalgo  de- 
scendent  of  the  conquistadores  to  the  millionaire  Spaniard  who  came 
out  forty  years  ago  with  his  worldly  possessions  in  a  cardboard  suit- 
case, and  who  now  took  care  to  avoid  the  old  Spanish  match-seller  who 
was  his  boon  companion  on  that  memorable  voyage.  Vendors,  hawk- 
ers and  fakers,  announcing  their  wares  as  loudly  as  they  dared  without 
arousing  the  wrath  of  the  haughty  army  officer,  master  of  ceremonies, 
who  would  presently  vent  his  spleen  upon  those  who  failed  to  snatch 
off  their  hats  at  the  first  note  of  the  national  anthem,  mingled  with 
honest  European  workmen  in  hoinas  and  alpargatas  and  sun-faded 
shirts,  enjoying  a  rare  day  of  recreation  in  the  life-time  of  toil  which 
they  naively  consider  their  natural  lot.  Though  wine  flows  as  freely 
in  Mendoza  as  in  Italy,  not  a  suggestion  of  drunkenness  did  I  see 
during  the  day. 

As  evening  advanced,  the  crowd  became  more  and  more  silk-hatted  in 
looks  and  temperament,  a  better  bred,  less  provincial^  more  cosmopoli- 
tan, yet  also  more  blase  throng  than  similar  gatherings  over  the  Andes. 
The  bony,  ungraceful  women  numerous  in  northern  countries  were 
rare,  the  plump  type  not  only  of  Mendoza  but  of  all  the  Argentine 
most  in  evidence  being  physically  attractive  in  spite  of  overdress  and 
enameled  faces.  Soon  after  full  darkness  had  fallen  some  of  the  most 
regal  equipages  fell  out  of  the  procession  by  failing  to  turn  the  outside 
corner  of  the  drive,  and  wended  their  way  homeward.  The  better 
class  of  hired  vehicles  gradually  followed  their  example ;  the  public 
hacks,  whose  occupants  were  having  perhaps  their  one  spree  of  the 
year,  at  last  got  tardy,  regretful  orders  to  turn  townward,  until  the 
place  was  left  again  to  the  foot-going  classes,  many  of  the  hawkers, 
fakers  and  vendors  still  wandering  among  them,  emitting  rather  help- 
less yelps  in  a  last  effort  to  be  rid  of  what  remained  of  their  wares. 
There  came  a  hurried  last  number  by  the  band,  cut  unseemly  short 
as  the  players  dropped  out  and  fell  to  stuffing  their  instruments  into 
their  covers,  and  behind  the  hurrying  musicians  the  last  stragglers 


1372  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

took  up  the  march  to  town.  Not  a  firecracker  had  exploded  all  day ; 
no  fireworks  enlivened  the  evening,  though  the  grounds  of  the  chief 
plaza  and  several  smaller  parks  were  gaudy  with  colored  electric  lights 
set  out  in  the  form  of  flower-plots,  and  similar  lights  outlined  the 
municipal  theater  into  which  all  those  who  had  attended  services  in 
the  morning,  with  the  exception  of  the  ecclesiastics,  crowded  to  hear 
"Rigoletto"  sung  by  fresh  young  Italian  voices  with  more  power  than 
polish. 

The  "Buenos  Aires  al  Pacifico"  has  several  lines  in  and  about  Men- 
doza  province,  with  frequent  trains  out  through  the  vineyard  districts. 
One  train  travels  an  S-shaped  route  and  comes  back  to  the  station  from 
which  it  starts  without  covering  any  of  the  ground  twice,  then  makes 
the  same  trip  in  the  opposite  direction.  When  I  rose  at  dawn,  the 
Andes  stood  out  against  the  sky  as  if  they  had  been  cut  out  of  card- 
board ;  by  the  time  I  had  reached  the  station  long  banks  of  steel-gray 
clouds  were  rising  like  a  steam  curtain  under  the  rays  of  the  red  sun, 
until  the  range  was  all  but  hidden  from  view.  My  journey  through 
the  vineyards  uncovered  great  peaks  capped  with  snow  and  glaciers 
that  seemed  to  touch  the  sky,  and  everywhere  were  grapevines,  stretch- 
ing away  in  endless  rows,  between  some  of  which  oxen  were  plowing 
and  men  hoeing,  vineyards  limited  only  by  the  horizon  or  the  Cordil- 
leras in  the  background.  As  there  is  little  natural  campo  on  which  to 
fatten  herds  in  Mendoza  province  and  insufficient  rainfall  to  make 
wheatfields  productive,  grapes  were  introduced  here  half  a  century  ago 
by  Spaniards  who  brought  them  over  from  Chile.  The  torrents  pour- 
ing down  from  mighty  Aconcagua  were  caught  and  put  to  work,  and 
wherever  there  is  irrigation  grapes  grow  abundantly  in  what  was  a 
bushy  Arizona  when  the  first  settlers  came,  until  to-day  the  province 
does  indeed  resemble  California.  For  a  long  time  Mendoza  furnished 
the  Argentine  all  its  wine.  Then  Europe  began  sending  it  over  at 
prices  that  competed,  the  vineyards  spread  into  neighboring  provinces 
along  the  base  of  the  Andes,  and  Mendoza  lost  its  monopoly.  When 
the  railroad  came,  it  brought  French,  Spanish,  and  Italian  peasants 
who  knew  grapes  as  they  knew  their  own  families,  and  the  Argentine 
became  the  greatest  wine-producing  country  in  all  the  world  outside 
western  Europe.  Now  there  is  a  little  corn,  alfalfa,  and  grain,  though 
all  these  are  insignificant  compared  to  the  principal  product.  Spaniards 
I  met  along  the  way  asserted  that  corn  or  wheat  paid  better  now  than 
grapes,  so  low  in  price  as  to  be  scarcely  worth   picking,  and  that 


OVER  THE  ANDES  TO  CHILE  73 

olives  would  do  best  of  all,  if  only  the  growers  would  bring  in  ex- 
perienced workmen  and  give  the  trees  proper  care. 

I  left  Mcndoza  on  a  crisp  May  morning,  and  the  autumn  leaves  I 
had  not  seen  for  years  were  falling  so  abundantly  that  a  line  from 
"Cyrano  de  Bergerac"  kept  running  through  my  head,  "Rcgardez  les 
feuilles,  comme  dies  tombcnt."  Here  they  lay  drifted  under  the  rows 
of  slender  yellowed  poplars  which  stretched  away  through  the  vine- 
yards, endless  brown  vineyards  everywhere  covered  with  the  dead 
leaves  of  autumn  standing  in  straight  rows  as  erect  as  the  flies  of  an 
army  and  backed  far  off  by  the  dawn-blue  Andes,  their  white  heads 
gradually  peering  forth  far  above  as  the  day  grew.  Between  the 
rows  glided  Oriental  looking  people,  lightly  touching  them  on  either 
side,  bent  on  unknown  errands,  for  the  fruit  was  nowhere  being 
gathered.  Unpicked  grapes,  shriveled  to  the  appearance  of  raisins, 
covered  even  the  roofs  and  bowers  and  patios  of  the  flat  adobe  houses. 
Here  and  there  a  weeping  willow  or  an  alfalfal  showing  the  advan- 
tages ef  irrigation  gave  a  contrasting  splotch  of  deep  green  to  the  vel- 
vety-brown immensity.  Before  his  majestic  entrance  the  god  of  the 
Incas  gilded  to  flaming  gold  a  fantastic  white  cloud  high  up  above  his 
eastern  portal,  then  lighted  up  the  files  of  yellowing  poplars,  then 
brought  out  the  golden-brown  of  the  vast  vineyards,  gave  a  delicate 
pink  shade  to  the  range  of  snow-clads  away  to  the  west,  and  at  last 
burst  forth  from  the  realms  of  night  in  a  fiery  glory  that  quickly  flooded 
all  the  landscape. 

I  am  not  sure  that  I  have  ever  seen  nature  so  nearly  outdo  herself 
as  in  this  dawn  and  sunrise  across  the  vineyards  of  Mendoza,  while 
we  crept  upward  from  the  Argentine  toward  the  Cordilleras.  No 
other  hour  of  the  day,  certainly,  could  have  equaled  this,  and  it  made 
up  amply  for  the  discomfort  of  being  routed  out  of  our  comfortable 
cabins  on  the  "International"  before  daybreak,  to  wash  in  icy  water 
and  stumble  about  in  the  starlight  until  we  were  thoroughly  chilled, 
before  we  had  been  permitted  to  board  the  little  narrow-gauge  tran- 
sandino  train,  so  tiny  in  contrast  to  the  roomy  express  that  had  car- 
ried us  across  the  pampas  that  one  seemed  crowded  into  unseemly 
intimacy  with  one's  fellow-travelers.  Across  the  aisle  sat  a  priest 
with  an  open  church-book,  mumbling  his  devotions  and  crossing  him- 
self at  frequent  intervals,  but  never  once  raising  his  head  to  g'ance 
out  the  window.  No  doubt  when  he  gets  to  Heaven  he  will  falsely 
report  that  the  earth  has  no  landscapes  to  vie  with  those  of  the  celestial 
realms.    Over  me  swept  a  desire  to  eet  off  and  walk,  to  stride  up  over 


74  WORKING  NORTH  FROAI  PATAGONIA 

the  steep  trails  and  feel  the  exhilarating  mountain  air  cut  deep  down 
into  my  lungs,  sweeping  through  every  limb  like  a  narcotic,  and  to  take 
in  all  the  magnificent  scene  bit  by  bit,  instead  of  being  snatched  along, 
however  slowly,  without  respect  either  for  nature  or  my  own  in- 
clinations. 

The  day  turned  out  brilliant  and  cloudless ;  in  full  sunshine  the  scene 
lost  some  of  its  delicate  beauty  of  coloring,  though  still  retaining  its 
grandiose  majesty.  The  vast  pampa  sank  gradually  below  us  as  we 
turned  away  toward  the  mountains,  the  irrigated  green  patches  grew 
almost  imperceptible.  Slowly  the  plain  itself  was  succeeded  by  fields 
of  loose  rocks  on  which  vegetated  a  few  gaunt,  deformed  trees,  spiny 
bushes,  gnarled  and  crabbed  clumps  of  brush  scattered  in  unneigh- 
borly  isolation.  The  sun  flooded  the  barren,  fantastic,  million-ridged 
and  valleyed  foothills  of  many  colors,  rolling  up  to  the  base  of  abrupt 
mountains  that  climbed,  rugged  and  unkempt  and  independent  of  all 
law  and  order,  like  some  stupendous  stairway  to  heaven,  to  the 
clouds  in  which  their  tops  disappeared.  Cliffs  washed  into  every 
imaginable  shape  by  centuries  of  hail,  snow,  and  mountain  winds — 
for  there  is  no  rain  in  this  region — cast  dense  black  shadows,  which 
in  the  narrow  valleys  and  tiny  scoops  and  hollows  contrasted  with 
the  thousand  sun-flaming  salient  knobs  and  points  and  spires  and  hill- 
ocks— a  lifeless  stony  barrenness  only  enhanced  by  the  scattered  tufts 
of  a  hardy  yellow-brown  bush  barely  a  foot  high. 

Hour  after  hour  we  wound  back  and  forth  across  the  river  Men- 
idoza,  fed  by  the  glaciers  above,  taking  advantage  of  its  two  flat  banks 
to  rise  ever  higher,  while  the  river  itself  grew  from  a  phlegmatic 
stream  of  the  plain  to  a  nervous  mountain  brook  racing  excitedly  past 
through  deep,  narrow,  rock  gorges.  The  rare  stations  were  "beauti- 
fied" with  masses  of  colored  flowers  that  would  have  been  pretty 
enough  in  their  place,  but  which  here  looked  tawdry  and  seemed  to 
mock  man's  feeble  efforts  to  vie  with  nature  in  her  most  splendid 
moods.  Above  Cachueta,  noted  for  its  hot  baths  exploited  by  the  city 
of  Mendoza,  in  so  dismal  a  landscape  that  visitors  come  only  from 
dire  necessity,  all  vegetation  had  disappeared  and  all  the  visible  world 
had  grown  dry  and  rocky  and  barren  as  only  the  Andes  can  be  in 
their  most  repellant  regions.  Not  even  the  cactus  remained  to  give  a 
reminder  of  life;  not  even  a  condor  broke  the  deadness  of  the  peaks 
which  seemed  cut  out  with  a  knife  from  the  hard  heavens.  After 
several  bridges  and  tunnels  there  came  an  agreeable  surprise, — the 
valley  of  Uspallata,  with  a  little  pasture  for  cattle.     But  this  oasis 


OVER  THE  ANDES  TO  CHILE  75 

did  not  last  long,  and  soon  the  dull,  reddish-brown  cliffs  sluit  us  in 
again.  Broken  and  irregular  peaks  eroded  into  thousands  of  valleys 
of  all  shapes  and  sizes  gave  lurking-places  in  vi'hich  shadows  still  hid 
from  the  searching  sun,  like  smugglers  on  a  frontier.  Though  a  cer- 
tain grandiose  beauty  grew  out  of  these  crude,  planless  forms  of  na- 
ture, they  ended  by  giving  the  beholder  a  disquieting  sadness.  One 
seemed  imprisoned  for  life  within  these  enormous  walls ;  the  utter 
absence  of  life,  the  uniformity  of  the  dry  desolation,  especially  the  oj)- 
pressive,  monotonous  solitude,  enhanced  by  a  dead  silence  broken  only 
by  the  panting  of  the  sturdy  little  locomotive  crawling  upward  on  its 
narrow  cogwheel  track  and  the  creaking  of  the  inadequate  little  cars 
behind  it,  seemed  to  hypnotize  the  travelers  and  plunge  them  into  a  sort 
of  stupor  from  w-hich  nothing  short  of  imminent  disaster  would  arouse 
them. 

Between  ever  higher  stations  the  only  signs  of  man  were  rare 
casuchas,  huts  of  refuge  built  of  the  same  dreary  material  as  the  hills, 
tucked  away  here  and  there  against  the  mountainsides.  Before  the 
building  of  the  railroad  these  served  travelers  as  shelters  for  the  night 
or  against  the  dreaded  tcniporalcs,  hurricanes  of  the  winter-bound  Cor- 
dillera. At  the  Puente  del  Inca,  a  natural  rock  bridge  under  which 
the  Mendoza  River  has  worn  its  way  in  a  chasm,  we  caught  the  first 
clear  glimpse  of  Aconcagua,  its  summit  covered  with  eternal  snow  and 
ice.  Yet  it  seemed  small  compared  with  the  tropical  giants  of  Chim- 
borazo  and  Huascaran,  with  their  immense  slopes  of  perpetual  blue  gla- 
ciers, perhaps  because  there  was  no  contrast  of  equatorial  flora  below, 
and  it  was  hard  to  believe  the  scientists  who  rank  it  the  highest  in  the 
western  hemisphere.  By  this  time  snow^  lay  in  patches  about  us  and 
stretched  in  streaks  up  every  crevice  and  sheltered  slope,  yet  the  mam- 
moth glacier  peaks  and  striking  Alpine  beauty  one  expected  was  lit- 
tle in  evidence. 

As  we  drew  near  Las  Cuevas,  the  increasing  desire  for  a  mountain 
tramp,  coupled  with  that  of  seeing  the  famous  "Christ  of  the  Andes" 
which  the  traveler  by  train  comes  nowhere  near,  caused  me  to  sound 
several  of  my  cosmopolitan  fellow-travelers  on  the  suggestion  of  leav- 
ing the  train  and  walking  over  the  summit.  But  the  few  of  them  who 
did  not  rate  me  hoj:>elessl5'  mad  felt  they  could  not  spare  the  three 
days  between  this  and  the  next  train,  even  if  they  were  not  seriously 
infected  with  the  tales  of  Chilean  bandits.  Yet  I  could  not  sit  supinely 
in  a  railway  coach  and  be  dragged  through  a  ding}',  three-mile  tunnel, 
to  come  out  on  the  other  side  without  having  seen  a  suggestion  of  the 


76  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

real  summit.  Besides,  there  was  another  excellent  reason  to  drop  off 
the  train  at  Las  Cuevas.  There,  at  the  mouth  of  the  international 
tunnel,  my  Argentine  pass  ended,  and  the  fare  through  and  over  the 
summit,  a  mere  fifty  miles  by  rail,  was  almost  twenty  dollars.  Even 
second-class,  with  the  privilege  of  sitting  on  a  wooden  bench  in  a  sort 
of  disguised  box-car,  was  but  little  less  than  that,  and  it  was  notice- 
able that  all  but  the  well-dressed  had  disappeared  from  this  also,  the 
most  expensive  bit  of  railroading  in  the  world  being  too  much  of  a 
luxury  for  the  rank  and  file.  These  high  rates  make  the  Andes  a 
doubly  strong  barrier  against  immigration  from  the  more  crowded  and 
less  capacious  Pacific  slope,  which  is  to  the  argentino's  liking,  for  on 
the  eastern  side  the  Chilean  is  hated  and  feared,  all  the  talk  of  inter- 
national affection  notwithstanding,  as  something  between  a  cruel  and 
piratical  Indian  and  a  Prussianized  tradesman. 

As  we  drew  into  Las  Cuevas  I  gathered  together  the  essentials  of 
kodak  and  notebook  and  turned  the  rest  of  my  baggage  over  to  a 
young  Norwegian  on  his  way  to  Valparaiso,  with  a  request  to  leave 
it  at  Los  Andes,  where  the  transandino  joins  the  government  railways 
of  Chile. 

The  train  went  on.  The  detachment  of  Argentine  police  that  had 
given  it  their  protection  up  from  Mendoza  clambered  upon  the  re- 
leased engine  and  went  back  down  the  mountain,  and  I  found  myself 
stranded  and  almost  alone  in  something  far  less  than  a  hamlet  at  more 
than  ten  thousand  feet  above  sea-level.  A  quick  movement  instantly 
reminded  one  of  the  height,  an  altitude  doubly  impressive  at  this  lati- 
tude and  at  this  season.  Even  near  midday  it  was  not  particularly 
warm  in  the  sunshine  and  it  was  decidedly  cold  in  the  shadows.  Yet 
I  must  climb  more  than  three  thousand  feet  higher  to  get  over  into 
Chile.  The  section-gangs  of  half-Indians,  in  their  heavy  knit  caps 
without  visors  and  thick  woolen  socks  reaching  to  the  knees,  were  a 
sullen,  cruel  looking  crew,  with  marks  of  frequent  dissipation  on  their 
bronzed  faces,  men  suggesting  the  Andean  Indian  stripped  of  his  liu- 
mility  and  law-abiding  nature  and  gifted  with  the  trickery  that  comes 
to  primitive  races  from  contact  with  the  outside  world. 

With  sunset  it  grew  bitter  cold,  an  icy  wind  howling  and  moaning 
incessantly  even  through  the  chinks  of  the  dismal,  guestless  frontier 
hotel  in  which  a  coarse  and  soggy  supper  cost  me  three  pesos.  When 
it  was  finished,  the  landlord  led  the  way  out  into  the  frigid,  blustery 
mountain  night  and,  wading  through  a  snow-drift,  let  me  into  the  first 
room  of  what  is  in  summer-time  a  crowded  wooden  hotel,  telling  me 


OVER  THE  ANDES  TO  CHILE  -jj 

to  lock  the  outer  door,  as  the  whole  building  was  mine.  What  he 
would  have  done  had  a  lone  lady  also  stopped  here  for  the  night  I  do 
not  know — wired  to  Mendoza,  perhaps,  for  a  chaperon.  I  burrowed 
under  a  veritable  wagon-load  of  (juilts.  Two  or  three  times  durin-^ 
the  night  I  awoke  and  peered  out  the  curtainless  window  upon  the 
bleak,  jagged  snow-clads  piled  into  th.e  starlight  above,  each  time  won- 
dering whether  day  was  near,  but  there  was  no  way  of  knowing,  for 
not  a  sound  was  to  be  heard  above  the  howling  of  the  wind  and  the 
shivering  of  the  doors  and  windows  of  the  unsheltered  wood  structure 

At  last  there  seemed  to  be  something  faintly  brighter  about  the  white 
crest  of  the  range,  and  I  coaxed  myself  out  of  bed.  The  darkness  was 
really  fading.  I  drank  the  cup  of  cold  tea  I  had  prevailed  upon  the 
landlord  to  leave  with  me  the  night  before,  strapped  on  my  revolver 
for  the  first  time  since  leaving  Bolivia,  and  set  out  as  soon  as  I  could 
see  the  next  step  before  me.  The  automobile  road  that  zigzags  up  the 
face  of  the  range,  accomplishing  the  journey  to  the  "Cristo"  in  seven 
kilometers  of  comparatively  easy  gradients  in  the  bright  summer  days 
of  December  and  January,  was  heaped  high  with  snow  in  this  May-day 
winter  season  and  was  plainly  impassable.  Beyond  the  last  dreary 
stone  refuge  hut  I  took  what  had  been  pointed  out  to  me  the  day  before 
as  a  short  cut  and,  picking  up  a  faint  trail,  set  out  to  scramble  straight 
up  the  barren,  rocky  slope  toward  the  grim,  jagged  peaks  above. 

For  hours  I  clawed  my  way  upward  through  loose  shale  and  broken 
rock,  all  but  pulling  the  mountain  down  about  my  ears,  slipping  back 
with  every  step,  filling  my  low  shoes  of  the  city  with  sand,  snow,  and 
the  molten  mixture  of  both,  panting  as  only  he  can  understand  who  has 
struggled  up  an  almost  perpendicular  slope  in  the  rare  atmosphere  of 
high  altitudes,  my  head  dizzy  and  my  legs  trembling  from  the  exertion. 
Every  now  and  then  I  had  to  cross  a  patch  of  hard  snow  or  ice  so  steep 
I  must  clutch  with  toes,  heels,  knees,  and  fingernails  to  keep  from  doing 
a  taboggan  to  perdition  hundreds  of  feet  below.  Sometimes  there  was 
nothing  for  it  but  to  spring  like  a  chamois  from  one  jagged  rock  to 
another,  at  the  imminent  peril  of  losing  my  balance  once  for  all.  In 
many  places  the  mountain  itself  was  made  of  such  poor  material  that 
it  came  apart  at  the  slightest  strain,  so  that  many  a  time  I  laid  hands 
upon  a  rock  only  to  have  it  come  sliding  down  toward  me,  threatening 
to  carry  my  mangled  remains  with  it  to  the  bottom  of  the  valley.  I 
would  gladly  have  gone  down  again  and,  after  kicking  the  "short  cut" 
informant,  made  a  new  start,  but  that  was  next  to  impossible.  It  was 
difficult  enough  to  climb  these  great  toboggan  fields  of  loose  shale  and 


78  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

ice;  it  would  have  been  a  rare  man  who  could  have  descended  them 
whole  without  at  least  the  aid  of  an  Alpine  stock.  There  remained  no 
choice  than  to  keep  on  picking  my  way  back  and  forth  across  the  face 
of  the  cliff,  gradually  clawing  upward,  reviving  my  spirits  now  and 
then  by  eating  a  handful  of  snow,  always  subconsciously  expecting  to 
receive  a  well-aimed  shower  of  stones  or  knives  from  a  group  of 
bandits  ensconced  in  one  of  the  many  splendid  hiding-places  about  me. 

I  had  lost  myself  completely  and,  convinced  that  I  was  in  for  an  all- 
day  struggle,  could  have  met  with  resignation  the  lesser  suffering 
meted  out  by  bandits,  when  I  suddenly  struck  what  proved  to  be  a 
gravelly  ridge  between  two  peaks  and  on  it  an  iron  caisson  marking 
the  international  boundary.  Far  from  coming  out  at  the  "Christ  of 
the  Andes,"  I  found  the  famous  statue  standing  in  utter  solitude  in  a 
sandy  pocket  of  the  mountains  free  from  snow  so  far  below  me  that  it 
looked  almost  miniature.  By  the  time  I  had  climbed  down  to  it,  how- 
ever, the  figure  itself,  erected  by  the  two  nations  to  signalize  what  they 
fondly  hope  will  be  perpetual  peace  between  them,  grew  to  several 
times  life  size  and  took  on  an  impressiveness  much  enhanced  by  its 
solitary  setting. 

Not  a  sign  of  humanity  had  I  seen  or  heard  when  I  emptied  mv 
shoes  and  set  off  down  the  opposite  slope.  On  the  Chilean  side  the 
highway  was  drifted  still  deeper  with  snow,  in  places  stone  hard,  in 
others  so  soft  that  at  every  step  I  sank  knee-deep  into  it.  The  brilliant 
sun  that  had  cheered  me  on  all  the  breathless  climb  here  grew  so  ardent 
that  I  was  forced  to  shed  my  outer  clothing.  I  was  present  at  the 
birth,  nay,  the  very  conception,  of  the  River  Juncal,  which  later  joins 
the  Aconcagua  and  flows  into  the  Pacific,  for  I  had  stood  even  higher 
than  the  point  where  the  snow  and  glaciers  begin  to  melt  and  trickle 
down  the  mountain.  It  is  this  foaming  blue  river  Avhich  carves  out  the 
route  down  into  Chile,  leaving  highway  and  railroad  the  precarious 
task  of  following  it  down  the  swift  and  insecure  slope. 

Near  the  mouth  of  the  international  tunnel  the  Lago  del  Inca,  beau- 
tiful in  its  setting  of  haggard  mountain  faces,  reflected  the  blue  of  the 
glaciers  and  the  white  of  the  snow  peaks  above.  From  there  on  all 
was  comparatively  easy  going,  for  though  the  sharp  ballasting  of  the 
little  narrow  cogwheel  railroad  mercilessly  gashed  and  tore  my  shoes, 
I  had  already  saved  enough  in  fare  to  buy  several  pairs.  Now  and 
then  I  met  a  work-train  straining  upward  out  of  the  mouth  of  a  sheet- 
iron  snow-shed  or  one  of  the  many  long  dark  tunnels  through  which  I 
passed  with  hand  on  revolver  butt.     By  the  time  I  had  met  several 


OVER  THE  ANDES  TO  CHILE  79 

section-gangs,  however,  dismal,  piratical  looking  fellows,  with  a  sug- 
gestion of  Japanese  features,  in  ragged  patched  ponchos  and  wide  felt 
hats,  I  decided  that  they  were  more  savage  in  appearance  than  in  char- 
acter, and  when  at  last  a  whole  gang  of  these  reputed  cut-throats  left 
off  work  to  show  me  a  short  cut,  I  laid  away  the  stories  I  had  heard  of 
them  along  with  the  fanciful  tales  of  danger  I  had  gathered  in  many 
other  parts  of  the  world.  They  were  rotos  indeed,  "broken"  not  only 
in  the  sartorial  Spanish  sense  in  which  the  word  is  used  in  Chile,  but  in 
the  meaning  it  has  in  American  slang.  Not  a  suggestion  did  they  have 
in  manner  or  features  of  that  hopefulness  of  the  Argentine  masses,  but 
rather  the  air  of  men  perpetually  ill  or  saddened  by  a  recent  death  in 
the  family,  who  lost  no  opportunity  to  drown  their  sorrows  in  strong 
drink. 

There  were  grades  as  steep  as  ten  per  cent,  in  the  rack-rail  line  down 
which  I  strode  at  forty  cents  a  mile.  In  places  the  western  face  of  the 
range  was  so  steep  that  the  mountain  fell  almost  sheer  for  hundreds  of 
feet  to  the  railroad,  the  loose  shale  seeming  ready  to  drop  in  mighty 
avalanches  and  bury  everything  at  the  slightest  disturbance,  and  sug- 
gesting some  of  the  problems  faced  by  the  American  engineers  who 
built  the  more  difficult  Chilean  half  of  the  transandino.  The  station  of 
Juncal,  perched  on  a  rock,  posed  as  a  railway  restaurant,  but  at  sight 
of  its  price-list  I  fled  in  speechless  awe,  and  at  the  next  stream  below 
fell  upon  the  lunch  I  had  been  brilliant  enough  to  pilfer  from  my  Ar- 
gentine supper  the  evening  before.  The  tiny  brook  that  had  trickled 
from  under  the  snow  below  the  "Cristo"  had  swollen  to  a  scarcely 
fordable  river  when,  toward  evening,  with  twenty-eight  miles,  or  more 
than  eleven  dollars'  worth,  of  ups  and  downs  behind  me,  the  huts  that 
had  begun  to  aj)pcar,  carelessly  tucked  in  among  the  broken  rocks  and 
mammoth  boulders  of  the  Rio  Juncal,  collected  at  last  into  a  little 
village  called  Rio  Blanco,  in  which  I  found  an  amateur  lodging.  I  had 
heard  that  Chile  was  different  from  the  other  west-coast  countries,  but 
this  first  glimpse  of  it  scarcely  bore  out  the  assertion.  Here  were  the 
same  squalor,  cur  dogs,  chicha — even  though  it  was  made  from  grapes 
— Indian  fatalism  and  indifference  to  progress  with  which  I  had  grown 
so  familiar  in  the  other  lands  of  the  Andes. 

Descending  still  farther  into  Chile  next  morning,  I  met  a  fellow 
tramp  limping  toward  the  summit,  a  mere  bundle  of  whiskers  and  rags, 
evidently  a  German,  though  he  was  either  too  surly  or  too  sad  to  speak, 
carrying  all  his  possessions  in  a  grainsack.  his  feet  wrapped  in  many 
folds  of  burlap.    The  twenty-two  miles  left  were  an  easy  day's  stroll. 


8o  WORKING  NORTH  FROAI  PATAGONIA 

much  of  it  through  the  rocky  canyon  of  the  river  that  had  roared  all 
night  in  my  ears.  In  mid-morning  I  passed  the  famous  "Salto  del 
Soldado,"  where  the  railroad  leaps  across  an  abysmal  chasm  with  the 
Rio  Juncal  brawling  and  foaming  at  its  bottom,  from  one  tunnel 
directly  into  another,  and  over  which  hovers  the  legend  of  some  soldier 
jumping  to  fame  and  death  in  the  revolt  against  Spanish  rule.  I  had 
dinner  in  an  outdoor  dining-room  under  a  red-flowered  arbor  beside 
the  track,  where  a  large  steak — of  rhinoceros,  I  fancy — corn  cakes 
fried  in  grease,  excellent  coffee,  and  endless  chatter  from  the  pudding- 
like Chilean  woman  serving  it,  cost  only  a  peso — and  the  peso  of  Chile 
is  but  little  money  indeed.  The  woman  had  never  in  her  life  been  a 
mile  farther  up  the  valley,  so  that  I  was  an  object  of  the  deepest  interest 
to  her  as  a  denizen  of  the  unknown  world  above  and  beyond  the  jagged 
snow-clad  range  that  bounded  her  horizon. 

By  afternoon  the  weather  had  become  like  May  at  home.  There 
was  nothing  autumnal  about  it  except  the  pencil-like  Lombardy  poplars 
touched  with  yellow  along  the  beautiful  valley  of  the  Juncal,  back  up 
which  one  looked  almost  wonderingly  at  the  glacier-capped  range 
W' ailing  off  the  rest  of  the  world.  The  country  was  very  dry,  the  hills 
inclosing  it  rocky  and  half-sterile,  yet  enlivened  by  the  green  of  the 
organ  cactus  which  grew  plentifully,  the  more  distant  ranges  showing 
a  faint  red  tinge  through  their  general  blackness.  Some  of  the  parched 
fields  were  being  plowed  with  oxen.  Gradually  the  mountains  flattened 
themselves  out,  a  genuinely  Andean  traffic  of  mules,  straw-laden 
donkeys,  and  half-Indian  arrieros  on  foot  grew  up  along  the  broad 
highway  following  the  valley,  now  well  inhabited,  chiefly  in  huts 
thrown  together  of  a  few  reeds  or  willows,  as  if  there  was  nothing 
to  look  forward  to  but  perpetual  summer.  The  once  narrow  gorge  had 
expanded  to  a  broad,  well-settled  valley  that  suggested  California 
when,  in  the  later  afternoon,  foot-sore,  but  many  dollars  ahead,  I 
w^andered  into  the  town  of  Santa  Rosa  de  los  Andes,  junction  point  of 
the  most  expensive  and  one  of  the  cheapest  railroads  in  the  world,  and 
found  my  half -forgotten  baggage  awaiting  me. 

The  bewhiskered  conductor  of  the  express  which  snatched  me  on 
into  the  night  looked  like  the  Bowery  at  five  in  the  morning.  Indeed, 
one  noticed  at  once  a  wide  difference  between  the  prosperous  spick- 
and-spanness  of  the  Argentine  and  squalid,  uncheerful,  roto  Chile, 
whether  in  the  crowds  of  poor  people  quarreling  over  the  few  crumbs 
of  coal  to  be  found  in  the  cinder  heaps  at  the  edge  of  town  or  in  the 
general  appearance  of  the  government  railway  and  its  rather  unkempt 


OVER  THE  ANDES  TO  CHILE  8i 

employees.  I  fell  asleep  soon  after  the  train  started  at  seven,  woke 
once  when  we  seemed  to  be  rushing  through  high  hills  and  over  deep 
valleys,  and  again  at  a  station  where  the  one  employee  and  the  two 
policemen  were  wrapped  to  the  eyes  in  ponchos  heavy  enough  for  the 
Arctic  circle.  Then  myriads  of  lights  flashed  up  out  of  the  night 
ahead,  the  brakes  ground  us  to  a  halt,  and  we  were  set  down  at  a 
station  named  "Mapocho,"  which  turned  out  to  be  one  of  three  serving 
Santiago,  capital  of  Chile. 


CHAPTER  V 

CHILEAN    LANDSCAPES 

SANTIAGO  rises  late.  I  had  wandered  a  long  hour  before  I  found 
a  cafe  open,  and  when  I  dropped  in  for  coffee  the  man  who  spent 
half  an  hour  preparing  it  grumbled,  "Eight-thirty  is  very  early 
in  Santiago."  ]\Iy  second  discovery  was  that  the  Chilean  capital  was 
squalid.  Landing  at  the  most  northern  of  her  three  railroad  stations — 
which  turned  out  to  be  no  worse  than  the  other  two — had  been  like 
dropping  into  Whitechapel ;  and  the  electric  sign  toward  which  I 
headed  had  brought  me  to  the  lowest  type  of  slum  hotel.  Had  I  come 
down  the  West  Coast  and  been  familiar  with  nothing  better  than  Lima, 
Santiago  would  perhaps  have  seemed  less  oppressive,  for  it  is  a  trifle 
more  modern  and  only  a  few  degrees  more  shabby  in  appearance  than 
the  City  of  the  Kings.  The  change  from  the  Argentine,  however,  or, 
more  specifically,  from  Buenos  Aires,  was  like  that  from  the  best 
section  of  New  York  to  the  lower  East  Side. 

This  contrast,  I  w^as  soon  to  discover,  is  to  a  large  extent  true  of  all 
Chile.  The  roto  who  makes  up  the  bulk  of  the  population,  in  or  out 
of  the  capital,  always  looks  like  a  very  low-paid  brakeman  on  a  coal- 
train,  who  has  just  come  in  from  an  all-night  run  through  a  waterless 
country.  With  this  class  as  a  basis,  Santiago  was  dirty,  unkempt, 
down  at  heel.  The  cobbled  streets  were  in  many  cases  only  half  paved, 
full  of  dusty  holes  with  loose  cobblestones  kicking  about  in  them ;  the 
very  house  fronts  were  covered  with  dust ;  nothing  seemed  to  have  been 
cleaned  or  repainted  since  the  last  century;  the  city  looked  as  if  the 
civic  feather-duster  had  been  lost — though  there  was  no  lack  of  ragged 
vendors  of  this  implement  making  the  day  hideous  with  their  cries. 
The  great  difficulty  seemed  to  be  that  few  could  afford  them,  for  it 
was  another  shock  to  find  that  prices  were  almost  as  lofty  in  Santiago 
as  in  Buenos  Aires. 

The  region  was,  to  be  sure,  suffering  for  lack  of  the  rain  that  eastern 
Argentine  had  received  in  such  superabundance,  but  this  did  not  wholly 
account  for  the  general  appearance  of  disrepair,  suggesting  a  place 
once  of  great  importance  that  had  lost  all  ambition  to  keep  its  social 

82 


CHILEAN  LANDSCAPES  83 

standing  in  the  world.  The  huge  checkerboard  town,  with  immense 
blocks  of  those  straight,  though  narrow,  streets  required  of  his  colonial 
builders  by  Charles  V  of  Spain — perhaps  because  he  had  grown  weary 
of  losing  himself  in  the  Bostonese  labyrinths  of  Spanish  cities — con- 
tained an  extraordinary  percentage  of  slums.  Miles  upon  miles  of 
cites  or  convcntillos,  ground-floor  tenements  of  single  rooms  opening 
off  blind  alleys,  stretched  away  in  every  direction  from  the  central 
plaza,  giving  oflf  the  odor  which  emanates  from  cheap  lodging-houses 
and  overcrowded,  unwashed  families.  It  was  the  squalor  of  cities,  too. 
as  distinguished  from  the  comparatively  agreeable  uncleanliness  of 
the  country. 

The  main  business  section  of  Santiago  is  relatively  small,  with  the 
more  important  stores,  banks,  and  offices  within  a  few  squares  of  the 
Plaza  de  Armas.  Even  this  was  considerably  down  at  heel.  The 
building  material  being  chiefly  mud  plastered  upon  wooden  slabs, 
there  are  many  half-ruined  buildings  near  the  center  of  town,  while 
"way  out  there  where  the  devil  lost  his  poncho,"  as  the  Chilean  calls 
the  far  outskirts,  some  of  the  conditions  were  incredible.  Unlike  the 
capitals  of  Argentine  and  Brazil,  Santiago  has  never  been  made  over 
and  modernized  by  the  federal  government,  for  all  its  abundance  of 
"saltpeter  money,"  and,  as  elsewhere  on  the  West  Coast,  there  is  no 
distinctly  residential  section.  Some  parts  are  a  trifle  more  fashionable 
than  others,  but  the  uniformity  of  the  town  is  on  the  whole  monoto- 
nous, doubly  so  because  there  are  few  buildings  of  interest  either  archi- 
tecturally or  otherwise.  A  square  surrounded  by  the  chief  public 
structures ;  the  capitol,  covering  an  entire  block  behind  the  cathedral : 
the  more  distant  Museum  and  Art  Gallery,  make  up  almost  the  entire 
list  of  imposing  buildings.  Long  galerias,  roofed  passages  that  are 
virtually  public  streets,  are  almost  the  only  unusual  feature.  Though 
its  architecture  is  what  might  be  called  modernized  Spanish,  with  some- 
times more  decorative  street-toeing  faqades  and  more  roomy  patios 
than  in  Spain,  it  lacks  some  of  the  attractiveness  of  Spanish  buildings, 
and  at  the  same  time  makes  little  provision  for  plumbing,  and  none 
whatever  for  artificial  heat.  In  Chile,  to  all  appearances,  the  social 
standing  of  soap  and  water  has  not  yet  been  recognized.  The  River 
Mapocho  runs  through  town  in  a  cobble-paved  channel,  but  like  those 
of  all  the  west-coast  capitals,  it  is  insignificant  either  as  a  stream  or  a 
laundry  and  bath.  Even  boarding-schools  and  colleges  take  no  ac- 
count of  that  strange  modern  habit  of  "washing  the  body  all  over"  ;  it 
is  a  rare  house  of  even  the  "proud  old  families"  that  has  a  bathroom. 


84  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Of  late  years  many  of  these  old  families  have  found  that  they  can 
materially  augment  their  ever  less  adequate  incomes  by  renting  the 
lower  stories  of  their  "palaces"  as  shops,  with  the  result  that  the  always 
slight  line  of  demarcation  between  business  and  residence  has  now  been 
almost  wholly  obliterated.  Under  the  portales  of  a  palatial,  red-brick 
building  covering  one  whole  side  of  the  main  plaza,  its  upper  stories 
once  the  "Hotel  de  France,"  but  now  a  dingy  vacancy,  are  dozens  of 
petty  httle  shops,  fly-swarming  fruit  and  peanut  and  sweetmeat  stands, 
uncleanly  male  and  female  vendors  of  newspapers.  As  elsewhere  in 
the  Andes,  there  are  many  little  cloth-shops  run  by  "Turks,"  as  South 
America  calls  the  Syrians,  Street  after  street  is  crowded  with  dingy 
little  hole-in-the-wall  merchants ;  street  stands  abound  in  which  are 
sold  the  favorite  dishes  of  the  gente  de  medio  pelo,  the  ragged  masses, 
— mote  molido  (boiled  and  mashed  ripe  corn)  ;  mote  con  huesillos  (the 
same  with  scraps  of  bones  and  meat  thrown  in),  and  the  thick,  greasy 
soup  known  as  caziiela.  The  half-trained  tailors,  to  whom  no  doubt 
is  due  the  fact  that  few  men  of  Santiago  are  in  any  sense  well-dressed, 
squat  in  little  one-room  dens,  gazing  out  upon  the  passing  throng  like 
the  craftsmen  of  Damascus.  To  make  matters  worse,  the  women  com- 
monly seen  on  the  street  are  almost  exclusively  mujeres  de  manto, 
dressed  in  crow-black  from  heels  to  the  fold  of  cloth  wrapped  about 
their  heads,  leaving  only  the  front  of  the  face  visible,  the  lack  of  color 
adding  to  the  general  gloom  of  the  town. 

In  contrast  there  is  much  sartorial  display  by  the  small  well-to-do 
class,  and  at  the  other  end  of  the  social  scale  there  are  many  hints  of 
the  picturesque.  Each  morning  heavily  laden  ox-carts  of  country 
produce,  drawn  by  four,  and  even  six,  oxen,  led  rather  than  driven  by 
men  walking  ahead  and  prodding  them  over  their  shoulders  with  long, 
sharp,  often  gaily  painted  goads  squawk  into  town  and  almost  to  the 
central  plaza.  The  wielders  of  the  goads  wear  the  short,  ragged 
ponchos,  sometimes  of  velvety  vicuna  cloth,  the  invariably  soiled  felt 
hats,  and  the  alpargatas,  or,  more  likely,  the  simple  leather  sandals 
called  hojotas  common  to  the  roto  class.  Some  of  these  countrymen 
come  riding  in  on  horseback,  their  half-bare  feet  thrust  into  large 
wooden  closed  stirrups,  and  adorned  with  immensely  rowelled  spurs, 
frequently  with  a  woman  sitting  sidewise  on  the  crupper  behind  them. 
Milkmen — who  are  often  mere  boys — use  what  we  call  a  police  whistle, 
and  make  the  morning  hideous  with  their  deliveries. 

It  is  only  from  Santa  Lucia  that  the  Chilean  capital  gives  a  suspicion 
of  its  great  extent.    This  crowning  glory  of  Santiago,  a  tree-clad  rocky 


CHILEAN  LANDSCAPES  85 

hill  rising  abruptly  in  the  center  of  the  ilat  city,  a  sort  of  perpendicular 
park  of  several  stories,  is  the  only  place  in  which  it  may  be  seen  in 
anything  like  its  entirety.  There,  four  hundred  feet  above  the  house- 
tops, one  realizes  for  the  first  time  that  it  may,  after  all,  have  four 
hundred  thousand  inhabitants.  To  climb  any  of  the  zigzag  rock-cut 
stairs  leading  upward  from  the  imposing  main  entrance  is  to  behold 
an  ever  spreading  vista  of  the  city,  stretching  far  away  in  every  direc- 
tion, monotonously  flat  and  low  except  for  several  bulking  old  churches 
of  the  colonial  Spanish  style.  The  chief  charm  of  the  town,  if  that 
word  can  be  used  of  a  city  that  has  little  of  it,  is  its  proximity  to  the 
Andes.  It  lies  well  up  in  the  lap  of  a  plain  more  than  two  thousand 
feet  high,  at  the  northern  end  of  the  great  central  valley  of  Chile  in 
which  most  of  its  population  is  gathered,  with  large  hills  in  the  far  dis- 
tance cutting  it  off  from  the  Pacific,  and,  so  close  at  hand  as  to  seem 
almost  above  it,  the  everywhere  dominating  background  of  the  main 
Cordillera  of  the  Andes.  But  for  this  great  white  overhanging  horizon, 
Santiago  would  be  commonplace  indeed ;  with  it,  its  most  dismal  scenes 
have  the  advantage  of  a  splendid  setting.  It  is  never  uncomfortably 
hot ;  its  brilliant  winter  days  are  magnificent,  chilly  rather  than  cold, 
even  in  the  mornings  and  evenings.  Except  for  a  few  kerosene  heaters 
in  the  more  luxurious  homes,  where  foreign  travel  has  broken  the  ice 
of  costumhrc,  artificial  heat  is  unknown.  The  wealthier  classes  keep 
warm  from  June  to  August  by  wearing  overcoats  and  wraps  indoors 
or  out,  at  the  theater  or  at  their  own  dinner  tables ;  the  great  ragged 
masses  accomplish  the  same  end  by  crowding  together  in  their  single- 
room  dwellings,  tightly  closing  all  windows — and  succumbing  early 
and  often  to  tuberculosis. 

Santiago  is  the  only  city  in  South  America  in  which  there  is  any 
noticeable  "smoke  nuisance" ;  the  belching  of  this  from  many  factory 
chimneys,  from  the  trains  of  the  government  railroad,  wath  its  smudgy, 
soft  Australian  coal,  adds  greatly  to  what  seems  to  be  a  natural  hazi- 
ness of  the  atmosphere.  But  one  may  forget  this  in  a  score  of  quiet 
shaded  nooks  of  Santa  Lucia.  Among  its  several  curiosities  are  a  drink- 
ing fountain — the  only  public  acknowledgment  that  water  is  required 
by  the  human  system  that  I  recall  having  run  across  in  South  America 
— and,  along  with  the  statue  of  Valdivia,  who  here  fortified  himself 
against  the  Indians,  and  of  an  odd  bishop  or  two,  the  tiny  Protestant 
cemetery  over  which  Vicuiia-Mackenna,  Chile's  chief  literary  light  and 
a  member  of  one  of  her  oldest  and  proudest  families,  caused  to  be 
erected  the  inscription,  "To  the  memory  of  those  exiled  from  both 


86  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Heaven  and  Earth."  Chile  has  never  taken  its  CathoHcism  in  homeo- 
pathic doses.  It  is  only  recently  that  even  Protestant  missionaries 
could  be  married  by  anyone  but  a  Catholic  priest ;  up  to  a  bare  decade 
ago  the  wicked  heretics  might  not  be  buried  in  cemeteries,  but  were, 
stuck  away  in  any  hole  in  the  darkest  hours  of  the  night,  to  be  dug  up 
next  day  by  prowling  dogs.  Largely  through  the  efforts  of  American 
missionaries  there  is  now  a  civil  cemetery  and  a  civil  marriage  law. 
Only  a  few  months  before  my  arrival  a  case  had  come  up  under  the 
law  against  having  a  saloon  next  door  to  a  church,  and  the  Supreme 
Court  rendered  the,  to  the  clericals  "sacrilegious  and  unprecedented," 
decision  that  a  Protestant  church  is  a  church,  even  in  Chile. 

Not  far  from  Santa  Lucia,  nearer  the  edge  of  the  town,  is  a  much 
larger  hill  made  of  the  loose  shale  common  to  the  southern  Andes  and 
of  much  the  same  appearance  as  the  one  of  the  same  name  overlooking 
Lima.  San  Cristobal  belongs  entirely  to  a  group  of  priests.  On  top 
of  it  is  a  gigantic  statue  of  the  particular  saint  of  their  order,  with  an 
immense  sheet-iron  halo  on  which  is  squandered  much  electricity ;  but 
this  is  ofifset  by  the  income  from  an  enormous  sign  just  below  it  adver- 
tising "Dulcinea  Tea."  The  Lick  Observatory  has  a  station  on  San 
Cristobal,  and  as  the  priests  have  begun  selling  the  mountain  as  a 
stone  quarry,  they  wrung  money  for  a  long  time  out  of  the  American 
scientists  by  threatening  to  dig  the  hill  away  from  under  them.  Now 
the  observatory  is  protected  by  an  injunction,  and  there  are  other  in- 
dications that  Chile  is  gradually  recovering  from  her  medieval  fanati- 
cism. 

Santiago  has  an  imposing  public  library,  one  which  was  not  only 
actually  open  but,  strange  indeed  in  Latin-America,  one  from  which 
books  could  be  taken — if  one  had  several  sponsors  and  could  deposit 
the  full  price  of  the  volume.  One's  attention  is  usually  first  drawn 
to  it  by  a  statue  of  two  famous  Chileans,  not  so  much  because  of  the 
artistic  merit  of  the  monument  as  for  the  terror  inspired  by  the  situa- 
tion of  the  two  immortals.  For  they  stand  some  thirty  feet  above  the 
pavement  on  a  pillar-like  pedestal  so  slender  that  a  single  step  back- 
ward or  forward,  the  slightest  jostling  of  each  other,  would  infallibly 
plunge  one  or  both  of  them  to  certain  death,  and  the  tender-hearted 
beholder,  glancing  at  their  constant  peril,  can  only  hurry  by  with 
averted  face.  Under  the  glass  dome  of  the  reading-room,  beyond 
which  most  books  never  pass,  readers  wore  their  hats  and  smoked 
when  they  chose.  There  were,  of  course,  no  female  readers.  It  is 
still  considered  unseemly  in  Chile  for  a  lady  to  be  seen  reading  any- 


CHILEAN  LANDSCAPES  87 

thing  but  her  prayer-book.  Here  I  heard  a  lecture  one  evening  under 
the  auspices  of  the  Geograpliical  and  Historical  Society  of  Cliile,  graced 
by  some  two  hundred  of  the  intcllectuales  of  Santiago.  The  lecturer, 
in  solemn  frock  coat,  lighting  his  cigarette  after  every  other  sentence 
and  letting  it  go  out  after  each  puff,  with  an  appalling  consumption  of 
matches,  read  a  long  and  laborious  dissertation  on  the  burning  question 
as  to  whether  the  great  Chilean  national  hero  had  been  entitled  to 
change  his  name  from  Higgins  to  O'Higgins.  The  speaker  contended 
that  this  was  proper ;  any  otlier  conclusion  would  have  made  him  an 
outcast  among  his  feWow-intellectuales,  for  it  would  have  been  attack- 
ing one  of  their  most  cherished  illusions.  But  the  long  hour  and  a  half 
during  which  he  argued  that  the  hero  in  question  came  of  noble  stock 
in  Ireland  and  was  not  the  descendent  of  Irish  peasants,  as  commonly 
claimed,  left  the  unprejudiced  hearer  unconvinced  and  secretly  giving 
the  oblivious  object  of  their  soHcitude  the  far  greater  credit  of  having 
climbed  to  eminence  from  the  more  humble  origin. 

There  is  a  saying  in  Chile  that  the  population  is  made  up  of  futres, 
bomheros,  and  rotos.  The  first  are  well-dressed  street-corner  loafers ; 
the  botnberos  are  volunteer  firemen,  and  the  rotos  form  the  ragged 
working  class  that  makes  up  the  bulk  of  the  population.  The  latter, 
said  never  to  be  without  the  corz'o,  an  ugly  curved  knife,  with  which 
they  are  quick  to  tripcar,  to  bring  to  light  the  "tripe,"  of  an  adversary 
by  an  upward  slash  at  his  abdomen,  are  not  merely  conspicuous,  but 
omnipresent.  Everywhere  this  class  is  struggling  for  its  livelihood. 
Great  streams  of  men  and  boys,  kaleidescopes  of  rags,  come  racing  out 
of  the  Mercuric  office  with  pink  copies  of  "Ultimas  Noticias"  and 
scatter  to  the  four  corners  of  the  flat  city — but  there  seem  to  be  more 
sellers  than  buyers.  Poor,  hopeless  eld  tramps  wander  up  and  down 
the  overnamed  Alameda  de  las  Delicias  with  baskets  of  grapes  covered 
with  dust  and  almost  turned  to  raisins,  vainly  trying  to  sell  them. 
Slatterns  and  slouches  are  the  rule  among  the  female  division  of  the 
rota  class,  and  Indian  blood  is  almost  always  present  in  greater  or 
less  degree.  In  the  Argentine  some  eighty  per  cent,  of  the  population 
is  said  to  be  foreign  born ;  in  Chile,  certainly  in  Santiago,  not  one  per- 
son in  ten  suggests  such  an  origin.  \'ery  strict  immigration  laws 
forbid  negroes,  Chinamen,  and  most  Orientals  to  enter  Chile,  but 
though  the  country  usually  welcomes  white  foreigners  with  open  arms, 
they  are  not  greatly  in  evidence.  The  inhabitants  of  all  classes  have  the 
west-coast  characteristics,  indefinable  but  unmistakable,  which  dis- 
tinguishes them  decidedly  from  the  people  of  eastern  South  America. 


88  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Santiago  has  been  called  the  "City  of  a  Hundred  Families,"  These, 
still  noted  for  their  Spanish  exclusiveness  and  aristocratic  pride,  pow- 
erful owners  of  most  of  the  country,  form  an  oligarchy  of  government 
i»  which  the  ostensibly  free-voting  roto  has  little  real  hand.  The  "best 
families"  oligarchy  virtually  tells  the  working  class  how  to  vote,  and 
in  the  main  it  does  as  it  is  bidden,  out  of  apathy,  to  be  obliging,  or  from 
pure  ignorance.  Balloting  is  not  really  secret  and  there  is  frequent 
corruption,  such  as  the  recent  notorious  case  of  half  the  ballot-boxes  in 
Santiago  being  carried  down  into  the  cellar  of  a  public  building  and 
stuffed  with  a  new  set  of  votes.  According  to  law,  the  voter  must  be 
able  to  read  and  write,  and  any  roto  whom  the  landlords  do  not  wish 
to  vote  is  denied  the  suffrage  on  this  elastic  ground.  On  the  whole, 
however,  the  oligarchy  seems  to  work  better  than  the  more  common 
Latin-American  rule  of  a  dictator  or  a  group  of  irresponsible  politic- 
ians. Its  great  fault  is  the  stone  wall  it  builds  against  rising  from  the 
ranks,  that  and  the  opportunity  it  gives  the  powerful  to  cast  upon 
weaker  shoulders  the  burden  of  taxation.  The  unfair  advantages  given 
descendants  of  the  favored  "best  families"  is  shown  in  the  frequent 
recurrence  of  the  same  name  in  Chilean  biographies  and  histories. 
The  expression,  "an  education  according  to  his  rank,"  is  often  heard, 
and  sounds  strangely  out  of  place  in  an  ostensibly  democratic  country. 
The  dawn  of  industrialism  is  suggested,  however,  in  the  strikes  which 
are  more  and  more  breaking  in  upon  the  aristocratic  patriarchal  life. 
One  cannot  imagine  any  other  Indian  of  the  Andes  striking,  but  his 
Araucanian  blood  has  made  the  roto  not  only  free  of  speech,  sometimes 
insolent,  ever  ready  with  his  corvo,  but  ready  to  fight  for  himself  in 
more  modern  ways. 

"Some  day,"  said  a  Chilean  man  of  letters,  "our  great  land  owners 
will  be  taxed  as  they  should  be;  but  that  will  probably  require  a  revolu- 
tion. The  big  absentee  landlords  exploit  our  natural  resources  and 
spend  their  incomes  in  Paris,  leaving  nothing  for  the  advancement  of 
the  country.  You  have  something  of  that  problem  in  the  United 
States,  but  the  proportion  of  your  idle  rich  who  spend  their  money 
abroad  is  negligible  compared  with  ours,  and  here  there  is  no  middle 
class  as  a  depository  of  the  real  culture  and  sense  and  moral  brawn 
of  the  nation." 

Some  of  the  old  families  of  Santiago  have  lost  their  wealth,  yet 
still  retain  their  pride  and  outward  aristocracy.  It  is  the  custom  of  all 
the  upper  class  to  go  away  for  the  summer,  not  so  much  because 
Santiago  grows  a  bit  warm  and  rather  dusty,  as  because  it  is  the  thing 


CHILEAN  LANDSCAPES  89 

to  do.  One  of  the  standing  stories  of  the  capital  is  of  poor  but  aristo- 
cratic families  who,  unable  to  afford  such  an  outing,  shut  themselves 
tight  up  in  the  back  of  their  houses  for  two  months  or  more,  living 
on  what  tlieir  trusted  servants  can  sneak  in  to  them.  Men  who  had 
every  appearance  of  being  trustworthy  assured  me  that  this  tale  was 
far  from  being  a  fable.  One  of  them  asserted  that  he  had  been  invited 
the  preceding  February  to  the  "home-coming  party"  of  a  family  whom 
he  knew  had  not  been  outside  Santiago  in  a  decade. 

History  is  continually  proving  that  unearned  wealth  takes  away  the 
energy  and  initiative  of  a  nation  as  of  an  individual,  and  Chile  is  no 
exception  to  the  rule.  In  the  far  north  of  the  country,  where  it  has 
not  rained  in  thousands  of  years,  are  deposits  which  give  Chile  almost 
a  world  monopoly  of  nitrate,  or  salitrc,  as  the  Chilean  calls  it,  the  only 
large  source  of  public  wealth  in  the  country.  The  high  export  duty 
on  this  gives  the  government  four-fifths  of  its  revenue,  most  of  which 
is  spent  in  Santiago  or  falls  into  the  pockets  of  politicians.  If  some 
town  in  the  far  south  needs  a  new  school,  or  a  pavement,  or  a  tin  hero 
to  set  up  in  its  central  plaza,  it  appeals  to  Santiago  for  some  of  the 
"saltpeter  money" ;  and  if  its  influence  is  strong  enough,  or  the  treasury 
is  not  for  the  moment  empty  and  praying  for  a  new  war,  the  request 
is  granted  in  much  the  same  spirit  with  which  our  congressmen  deliver 
"pork"  to  their  constituents.  Naturally  this  destroys  civic  pride  of 
achievement  and  municipal  team-work.  Instead  of  spending  the 
greater  part  of  her  revenue  from  nitrates  to  develop  some  industry  to 
take  their  place  when  they  are  exhausted,  "we  are  like  a  silly  wanton, 
who  squanders  her  easy  winnings  for  gewgaws  without  recognizing 
that  the  time  is  close  at  hand  when  her  only  source  of  income  will 
disappear,"  insisted  one  far-sighted  Chilean.  "Once  our  saltpeter  gives 
out  and  Europe  stops  lending  us  money,  we'll  go  to  the  devil." 

The  fertile  southern  half  of  the  ribbon-shaped  country  is  excellent 
for  agriculture;  her  population,  smaller  but  far  more  dense  than  that 
of  the  Argentine,  is  already  utilizing  nearly  all  her  resources  above  or 
under  ground ;  in  the  past  century  Chile  has  had  only  one  revolution 
serious  enough  to  have  echoed  in  the  outside  world,  but  that  gives 
a  misleading  impression  of  her  law-abiding  qualities.  Indeed,  all  such 
blanket  statements  give  rather  a  false  impression,  for  the  country  is 
assured  no  such  prosperous  future  as  they  seem  to  suggest.  Though 
he  is  superior  to  the  Ecuadorian,  and  perhaps  to  the  Peruvian,  it 
would  be  easy  to  get  an  exaggerated  notion  of  the  Chilean.  He  is 
interested  only  in  to-day ;  he,  and  especially  his  wife  and  children,  are 


go  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

much  given  to  show  and  artificial  makeshifts:  if  he  is  not  exactly  lazy 
he  is  at  least  far  less  active  and  has  less  initiative  than  the  more  Euro- 
pean argentino. 

Chile  is  the  home  of  fires  and  the  dread  of  insurance  companies. 
The  latter  are  said  to  demand  higher  rates  than  anywhere  else  on 
earth,  and  the  agent  of  an  important  foreign  one  assured  me  that  all 
his  clan  live  in  fear  and  trembling  toward  the  end  of  each  month  and 
particularly  at  the  end  of  the  year,  when  their  clients  are  balancing 
their  books,  because  of  the  epidemic  of  arson  which  results  from 
attempts  to  recoup  fortunes.  This  short-cut  to  solvency  is  constantly 
referred  to  in  newspapers,  plays,  and  conversation;  nor,  if  we  are  to 
believe  the  older  native  novels,  is  it  anything  new.  Chilean  law  re- 
quires the  immediate  arrest  of  the  owner  and  the  occupant  of  a  burning 
building,  it  being  the  contention  that  either  the  one  or  the  other  is 
almost  sure  to  be  the  instigator  of  the  fire.  Nor  is  it  up  to  the  govern- 
ment to  prove  that  the  suspect  started  the  conflagration,  but  the  task  of 
the  latter  to  show  that  he  did  not,  which  is  a  horse  of  quite  a  different 
color.  The  country  is  lined  with  blackened  ruins,  from  mere  ranches 
to  modern  several-story  buildings  in  which  lives  have  frequently  been 
lost,  I  saw  more  burned  buildings  in  Chile  than  in  all  the  rest  of 
South  America,  and  far  too  many  to  be  accounted  for  merely  by  the 
somewhat  greater  prevalence  of  wooden  structures. 

The  fires  themselves  would  be  serious  enough,  were  there  not  the 
bomberos  to  make  them  doubly  so.  There  are  no  professional  fire 
departments  in  Chile.  The  glorious  honor  of  fighting  the  flames  is 
appropriated  by  the  elite,  much  as  certain  regiments  and  squadrons 
are  open  only  to  a  certain  caste  in  our  largest  cities.  The  youthful 
males  of  Santiago's  "best  families"  become  bomberos  because  it  is  con- 
sidered one  of  their  aristocratic  privileges  to  parade  before  their  enam- 
ored ladies  in  fancy  uniforms  and  glistening  brass  helmets.  As  often 
as  a  fire  bell  rings,  all  upper-class  functions  are  temporarily  suspended 
and  all  the  young  bloods  run — to  the  fire?  Certainly  not !  They  hasten 
home  to  don  their  splendid  bombcro  uniforms,  without  which,  nat- 
urally, it  would  be  highly  improper  to  attack  the  flames.  The  news- 
papers always  include  in  their  report  of  a  fire  the  assertion  that  "the 
bomberos  arrived  with  their  customary  promptitude,"  which  has  the 
advantage  of  being  both  true  and  courteous. 

There  being  no  National  Guard  in  Chile,  gilded  youth  has  no  other 
convenient  way  of  showing  of¥  in  uniform  than  to  join  the  bomberos. 
The  regular  army  would  be  too  serious  an  undertaking  for  them,  even 


At  last  I  came  out  high  above  the  famous  "Christ  of  the  Andes"  in  a  bleak  and  arid  setting 


The  "Lake  of  the  Inca"  just  over  the  crest  in  Chile 


and  his  cowboys  at  an  eslancia  round-up  in  northern  Uruguay 


£.'.■3-  «a'j,  .ie>_5« 


mm^^  :i?f^^ji 


Freighting  across  the  K'-ntly  rolhi.t;  )■ 


'J'ui-JjjL.   l-a;id' 


CHILEAN  LANDSCAPES  91 

if  it  were  not  below  their  dignity.  Moreover,  this  is  founded  on  con- 
scription, with  a  year's  service  for  those  who  "draw  unlucky,"  and  as 
the  influence  of  caste  is  powerful  in  manipulating  the  drawings,  the 
ranks  are  filled  almost  entirely  with  rotos  or  the  poorer  classes.  The 
Chilean  army  is  German  in  tone  and  uniform,  even  to  the  big  gray 
Prussian  cai)es  of  the  officers,  many  of  whom,  as  well  as  tlie  com- 
mander-in-chief, were  of  that  nationality  up  to  the  outbreak  of  the 
World  War.  The  army  is  much  in  evidence  and  its  splendor  is  in 
great  contrast  to  the  shoddy,  ragged  dress  of  the  bulk  of  the  civilian 
population.  Its  immediate  neighbors  credit  Chile  with  a  strong  Prus- 
sian temperament,  and  it,  in  turn,  sends  officers  to  train  the  troops  of  its 
more  distant  neighbors.  Those  who  should  know  maintain  that  it  is 
only  the  army  that  saves  the  oligarchy  in  power  from  the  revolutions 
that  are  frequently  on  the  point  of  breaking  out,  but  of  which  the 
outside  world  seldom  hears.  Chile  has  no  conscription  for  her  navy, 
and  for  the  first  time  outside  my  own  land  I  found  placards  picturing 
the  ideal  life  recruiting  officers  would  have  us  believe  is  led  on  war- 
ships. As  the  Chilean  on  his  narrow  strip  of  beach  is  almost  English 
in  his  feeling  for  the  sea,  there  seems  to  be  no  great  difficulty  in  man- 
ning the  best,  or  at  least  the  second  best,  navy  in  South  America. 

Chileans  themselves  frequently  refer  to  the  prevalence  of  thieving 
among  their  national  characteristics,  and  explain  it  by  saying  that  the 
Araucanian  Indians,  who  make  up  the  basis  of  the  population,  had 
communal  ownership  and  still  have  little  conception  of  the  line  be- 
tween mine  and  thine.  Half  the  nation  is  by  its  own  official  admission 
of  illegitimate  birth.  In  various  parts  of  Santiago  there  are  doors 
fitted  with  a  turno,  known  among  the  English-speaking  residents  as  a 
"bastard  barrel,"  softly  upholstered,  into  which  a  baby  may  be  dropped, 
the  turno  given  a  half  turn  and  a  bell  beside  it  rung,  when  nuns  or 
their  agents  on  the  inside  take  charge  of  the  mite  without  asking  ques- 
tions. Thousands  of  "orphans,"  whose  parents  are  still  running  about 
town,  are  housed  by  charity,  and  long  troops  of  them  may  be  seen  any 
fine  day  taking  an  airing  in  the  streets.  This  condition  is  by  no  means 
entirely  the  fault  of  the  roto  class.  None  but  the  civil  marriage  is  now 
legal  in  Chile,  whether  by  priest,  minister,  missionary,  or  rabbi;  but 
the  poor  man  must  take  a  day  or  more  off  and  disentangle  much  red 
tape  to  get  married,  only  to  be  informed  by  his  priest  that  in  the  eyes 
of  the  church  he  is  not  married  at  all,  until  he  produces  a  handful  of 
pesos  to  have  the  union  religiously  sanctioned.     As  throughout  Latin- 


92  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

America,  he  is  apt  to  conclude  that  the  ceremony  is  a  mere  waste  of 
time  and  money. 

Small  as  is  the  foreign  population  of  Chile,  the  church  is  largely 
in  the  hands  of  foreigners,  so  that  "a  Chilean  cannot  be  born  or  mar- 
ried or  die  without  the  permission  of  a  Spanish,  Italian,  or  French 
priest."  German  monks  and  nuns  are  also  numerous,  yet  Chileans  are 
not  admitted  to  most  of  the  monasteries  and  convents.  The  foreign 
priest  not  only  makes  the  native  pay  high  for  his  confessions  and  other 
formalities,  but  frequently  refuses  him  a  pass  through  purgatory 
unless  he  leaves  the  church  a  large  legacy  to  cover  his  unquestionably 
numerous  sins.  Though  this  property  is  ostensibly  used  to  aid  Chile 
with  schools  and  the  like,  even  devout  Chileans  assert  that  their  for- 
eign priests  send  most  of  the  proceeds  to  the  "Capital  of  the  Christian 
World."  Complaints  against  these  conditions  are  legion,  but  the  Chil- 
ean, like  most  Latin-Americans,  is  more  noted  for  criticism  than  for 
effective  action. 

Though  Santiago  rises  late,  and  usually  takes  a  siesta  from  twelve 
until  two,  it  retires  early.  Being  the  social  and  fashionable,  as  well  as 
the  political,  center  of  the  republic,  it  has,  of  course,  its  elaborate 
"functions,"  and  it  is  still  near  enough  to  the  colonial  days  to  retain 
the  weekly  plaza  promenade.  On  gala  occasions  this  is  worth  seeing. 
Santiago  is  one  of  the  countless  cities  which  claim  to  have  the  most 
beautiful  women  in  the  world,  and  some  of  the  claimants  to  this  dis- 
tinction are  comely  even  under  their  deluges  of  rice  powder.  Chilean 
women  of  the  better  class,  with  their  pale,  oval  faces  and  their  velvety 
black  eyes,  have  a  vague  sort  of  melancholy  in  their  manner,  as  if  they 
were  thinking  of  the  great  world  on  the  other  side  of  the  tropics,  or  at 
least  over  the  wall  of  the  Andes.  But  evening  entertainments  are  scarce 
and  poor  in  Santiago,  and  by  ten  at  night  the  streets  are  commonly 
deserted,  except  by  the  stolid  jmcos  wrapped  in  their  heavy  black  uni- 
forms, and  all  doors  are  closed  save  those  of  a  few  cafes  that  drag  on 
until  midnight.  Half  a  dozen  cinemas  unroll  their  nightly  rubbish, 
usually  fantastic  and  volcanic  dramas  from  Italian  film  houses,  woven 
Lround  the  eternal  triangle;  now  and  then  a  zar^uela  company  suc- 
ceeds in  making  a  passable  season  of  it.  The  favorite  zarzuelas  are 
such  gems  as  "La  Sehora  no  Quiere  Comer  Sola"  (Madam  does  not 
wish  to  eat  alone),  or  "No  Hagas  Llorar  a  Mama"  (Do  not  make 
Marna  weep),  the  surest  way  to  avoid  which  would  seem  to  be  to  keep 
her  away  from  the  histrionic  efforts  of  the  Chilean  capital.  Yet  the 
elite  oi  Santiago  attend  these  mishaps  in  considerable  force  and  fancy 


CHILKAN  LANDSCAPES  93 

garb,  including  overcoats  or  wraps  in  the  unheated  buildings,  all  labor- 
ing under  the  delusion  that  they  are  being  entertained.  There  is  opera 
for  a  month  or  two  in  the  winter ;  on  rare  occasions  a  really  good 
dramatic  company,  rather  Italian  than  Spanish,  makes  a  brief  stay — 
and  generally  loses  money,  since,  as  a  Chilean  novelist  puts  it,  "the 
artistic  taste  of  our  public  is  better  suited  to  the  slap-stick  of  short 
plays  or  the  immaturity  of  some  circus  of  wild  animals."  But  the 
audiences  which  these  entertainments  turn  out  toward  midnight  quickly 
fade  away  and  leave  the  streets  to  solitude. 

Among  the  poorer  classes  the  samacueca,  the  native  dance  of  Chile, 
popularly  called  a  "  'cueca,"  is  a  principal  diversion.  A  man  and 
woman,  each  waving  a  large  gay  handkerchief,  move  back  and  forth, 
as  if  alternately  repelling  and  inciting  each  other,  to  the  tune  of  a 
harp  and  a  guitar  and  the  clapping  of  many  hands,  while  a  big  pitcher 
of  chicha  de  manzana  or  de  nva,  which  roughly  correspond  to  our 
cider  and  grapejuice  respectively,  passes  from  mouth  to  mouth.  The 
better-dressed  class  has  certain  simple  pastimes  in  which  both  sexes 
join,  though  not  often  and  never  without  an  awe-inspiring  display  of 
chaperons  on  the  side  lines.  There  is,  for  instance,  the  "whistling 
game."  A  man  in  competition  with  several  of  his  spatted  fellows  runs 
four  hundred  meters,  stops  in  front  of  a  lady  and  w^histles  a  tune,  the 
name  of  which  she  hands  him  on  a  slip  of  paper,  the  first  one  to  finish 
the  tune  without  error  and  to  return  to  the  starting-point,  being  ad- 
judged the  winner.  On  the  whole,  the  Spanish  spoken  by  this  class 
of  Chileans  is  better  than  that  heard  in  the  Argentine,  though  there 
are  many  "chilenismos,"  expressions  peculiar  to  the  country.  Chile 
usually  gives  the  "11"  its  full  sound,  rather  than  reducing  it  to  a  poor  "j," 
but  the  "s"  is  largely  suppressed.  In  spelling  the  country  has  certain 
rules  of  its  own,  the  most  noticeable  being  the  use  of  "j"  in  many  places 
where  Spaniards  use  "g,"  a  legacy  left  by  the  Venezuelan,  Andres  Bello, 
first  president  of  the  University  of  Chile. 

I  had  looked  forward  with  some  interest  to  that  far-famed  feature 
of  Santiago,  her  female  street-car  conductors.  Familiar  as  they  have 
since  become,  Chilean  women  led  the  world  in  this  particular,  the 
custom  dating  back  to  the  war  with  Peru,  a  long  generation  ago.  The 
street-cars  of  Chile  are  of  two  stories.  Most  of  them  are  operated 
by  a  woman  and  a  bey,  about  half  the  force  being  female  and  few  of 
the  rest  grown  to  man's  estate.  The  boy  is  the  conductor,  which  in 
Spanish  means  the  motorman,  and  the  woman  cobrador,  or  collector. 
Far  from  inspiring  the  protection  of  wealthy  rakes  or  causing  enam- 


94  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

ored  youths  to  squander  their  income  riding  back  and  forth  in  the  car 
presided  over  by  some  unrelenting  Dulcinea,  however,  most  of  the 
latter  excite  such  repugnance  that  the  more  squeamish  prefer  to  suffer 
a  slight  financial  loss  to  accepting  change  from  their  unsoaped  hands. 
On  the  back  platform  of  the  dingy  electric  double-deckers  usually 
stands  as  unentrancing  a  member  of  the  fair  sex  as  could  be  found 
by  long  search,  her  dismal  appearance  enhanced  by  the  mournful, 
raven-black  costume  she  wears.  She  is  sure  to  be  part  Indian,  her 
coarse  hair  tied  in  an  ugly  knob  at  the  back  of  her  head,  high  on  top 
of  which  sits  a  hat  of  polished  black,  with  a  long  pin  stuck  through  it 
to  add  to  the  perils  of  Hfe.  In  short,  Chile's  female  conductors  are  not 
giddy  young  girls,  but  stolid  women  of  the  working-class,  very  intent 
on  their  duties  and  only  rarely  whiling  away  an  odd  moment  in  harm- 
less gossip  W'ith  the  youthful  motorman  of  the  car  behind.  Some 
romancer  has  written  that  the  beautiful  members  of  the  clan  are 
quickly  recruited  to  more  romantic  service.  Perhaps  they  are,  for 
they  certainly  are  not  on  the  cars. 

Street-car  fares  are  absurdly  cheap  in  Chile,  so  cheap,  in  fact,  that 
the  service  cannot  but  be  poor  and  dirty.  Inside  the  cars  riders  pay 
ten  centavos ;  up  on  the  imperiale  they  pay  five,  w^hich  at  the  commonly 
prevailing  rate  of  exchange  is  less  than  two  and  one  cents  respectively. 
Not  the  least  amusing  thing  about  Santiago  is  the  street-car  caste,  or  the 
line  of  demarcation  between  the  upstairs  and  downstairs  riders.  The 
white-collar,  non-laboring  class  will  stand  packed  like  cordwood  in 
the  closed  car  rather  than  go  up  on  the  imperiale,  which  is  not  only 
preferable  in  every  way  but  cheaper.  It  is  this  latter  detail  that  makes 
the  upper  story  forbidden  ground  for  the  ge-nte  decente.  As  a  Chilean- 
born  business  man  of  English  parents,  educated  in  London  and  widely 
traveled,  put  it  in  criticizing  my  "bad  habit"  of  riding  on  top : 

"I  would  much  rather  ride  up  there,  too;  it  is  airy,  cleaner  than- 
inside,  you  can  see  the  sights,  and  the  weather  is  generally  fine  in- 
Santiago.  But  if  I  did,  my  friends  would  look  up  from  the  sidewalk, 
nudge  one  another,  and  say,  'Hullo,  by  Jove !  There  's  Johnny  Ed- 
wards up  there  with  the  rotos.  What's  the  matter;  can't  he  afford  a 
penny  to  ride  inside  ?  I  'd  better  collect  that  little  debt  he  owes  me 
before  he  goes  bankrupt,'— and  within  a  day  or  two  my  creditors  would 
be  down  ufJon  me  in  droves." 

The  Chilean  peso  is  a  mere  rag  of  paper,  originally  engraved  in  New 
York  and  more  nearly  resembling  our  own  bills  than  those  of  most 
South  American  countries.    Theoretically  worth  a  French  franc,  it  is 


CHILEAN  LANDSCAPES  95 

as  doubtful  of  value  as  legibility,  being  unredeemable  either  in  gold  or 
silver  and  waking  up  each  morning  to  find  itself  different  from  the 
day  before.  On  the  face  of  the  few  bills  that  still  have  visible  words 
runs  the  statement,  "The  government  of  Chile  recognizes  this  as  a 
peso  fiiertc,"  which  is  by  no  means  the  same  thing  as  promising  to  pay 
a  "strong  peso"  to  the  holder  upon  demand.  The  congress  of  Chile 
has  decreed  that  the  peso  shall  be  worth  ten  English  pence ;  but  there 
is  nothing  quite  so  incorrigible  in  disobeying  the  laws  of  a  country  as 
its  national  currency,  particularly  one  in  which  it  is  the  custom,  when 
in  need  of  money,  to  go  to  a  printing  office  instead  of  to  a  bank.  No 
wonder  there  is  no  national  lottery  in  Chile;  playing  the  exchange  is 
gambling  enough  to  suit  anyone. 

With  the  exception  of  a  few  private,  narrow-gauge  lines  in  the 
nitrate  and  coal  fields,  the  railroads  of  Chile  are  government  owned. 
A  state  line  now  runs  the  length  of  the  country,  connecting  its  southern- 
most port  on  the  mainland  with  its  most  northern  province,  and  even 
with  the  capital  of  Bolivia.  In  the  fertile,  well-inhabited  southern  half 
of  the  country  the  railroads,  Hke  the  more  important  ones  of  the  Ar- 
gentine, have  the  broad  Spanish  gauge,  and  down  to  where  the  popula- 
tion begins  to  thin  out  the  trains  are  long  and  frequent.  The  "Longi- 
tudinal," running  for  hundreds  of  miles  northward  from  the  latitude 
of  the  transandino  through  dreary  deserts  a  bare  meter  wide,  car- 
ries neither  through  passengers  nor  freight.  The  former  would 
probably  die  of  monotony  or  thirst  on  the  way ;  the  latter  would  be 
valuable  indeed  after  paying  the  breath-taking  freight  rates.  It  is  far 
quicker,  more  pleasant,  and  cheaper  to  take,  or  to  send  by,  the  steamers 
along  the  coast,  and  the  real  raison  d'etre  of  the  "Longitudinal"  is 
Chile's  determination  to  keep  the  two  provinces  she  took  from  Peru. 

On  the  whole,  the  railroads  of  Chile  are  a  sad  commentary  on  gov- 
ernment ownership.  There  are  probably  more  employees  to  the  mile 
on  Chilean  railroads  than  on  any  other  system  in  the  world,  not  be- 
cause the  Chilean  is  a  particularly  poor  workman,  but  because  poli- 
ticians foist  upon  the  helpless  public  carriers  so  many  needy  but  in- 
fluential constituents.  Yet  both  roadbeds  and  rolling  stock  of  this 
overmanned  system  are  astonishingly  descuidado, — uncared  for,  dust- 
covered,  unwashed,  loose,  broken,  out  of  order,  inadequate,  with  whole 
train-loads  of  perishable  goods  rotting  in  transit,  and  frequent  wrecks. 
It  is  common  rumor  that  the  government  pays  twice  the  market  price 
for  all  railway  supplies,  thanks  to  the  carelessness  and  the  grafting 
tendencies  of  the  personnel,  while  every  year  finds  the  railroads  with  a 


96  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

million  or  more  deficit.  How  carelessly  the  trains  are  operated  is 
suggested,  too,  by  the  extraordinary  prevalence  of  missing  legs  in 
Chile.  It  seemed  as  if  one  could  scarcely  look  out  a  train  window 
without  seeing  someone  crutching  along  beside  the  track,  to  say  noth- 
ing of  those  entirely  legless,  as  if  the  railroad  habitually  ran  amuck 
among  the  population. 

Started  by  Meiggs,  the  fleeing  Californian  who  carried  the  locomo- 
tive to  the  highlands  of  Peru,  and  continued  by  a  deserter  from  an 
American   sailing  ship,   the  Chilean   railroads   were  built   chiefly  by 
American  capital,  as  well  as  by  American  engineers.     They  still  bear 
many  reminders  of  that  origin.    The  passenger-trains  have  comfortable 
American  day  coaches,  made  in  St.  Louis;  the  sleeping-cars  are  real 
Pullmans;   even    the    freight-cars    closely    resemble   our   own.      The 
engines,  though   supplied  with  bells,   are  more  often  of   British   or 
German  origin,  or  from  the  government  shops  near  Valparaiso.    There 
are  three  classes,  or,  more  exactly,  five,  for  the  prices  and  service  on 
the  express  trains  are  different  from  the  corresponding  ones  on  the 
wixtos.     Except  that  in  the  former  one  is  more  certain  of  having  an 
entire  seat  to  oneself,  there  is  little  difference  between  first  and  second 
class.     Fares  are  comparatively  low  even  in  these;  on  the  lengthwise 
wooden  benches  of  third  class  they  are  cheaper  than  hoboing.    Trunks, 
however,  pay  almost  as  high  as  their  weight  in  passenger,  there  being 
no  free-baggage  allowance.    The  assertion  is  frequently  h^ard  in  Chile 
that  third  class  is  a  disadvantage  to  the  country,  because  the  low  price 
makes  it  too  easy  for  the  roto  masses  to  move  about.    A  rule  that  might 
not  be  amiss  in  our  own  land  is  that  the  engineer  who  jerks  a  train 
either  in  coming  into  or  leaving  a  station  is  subject  to  a  fine,  if  not 
to  dismissal — but  of  course  the  Brotherhood  would  never  permit  any 
such  interference  with  their  long-established  privileges.    The  trainboy 
nuisance,  here  known  as  a  cantinero,  with  the  accent  on  the  beer,  is  in 
full  evidence.     Though  the  night  trains  carry  Pullmans,  there  are  no 
diners,  because  concessions  have  been  given  at  various  stations  to  men 
of  political  influence  to  run  dining-rooms  and  the  trains  must  stop 
there  long  enough  to  contribute  the  customary  rake-off.    The  monopo- 
lists are  less  given  to  brigandage  than  they  might  be,  however,  and  of 
late  there  has  been  inaugurated  a  system  of  sealed  lunches  at  three 
pesos,  including  a  half-bottle  of  wine.     Moreover,  it  is  a  rare  station 
that  does  not  have  a  crowd  of  female  food-vendors,  especially  well- 
stocked  with  fruit  in  the  autumn  season. 

The  eight  o'clock  express  from  Santiago  sets  one  down  in  Valparaiso. 


CHILEAN  LANDSCAPES  97 

one  hundred  and  twenty  miles  away,  at  noon.  From  the  Mapocho 
station  the  train  climbs  out  of  the  central  valley  of  Chile,  squirming 
its  way  through  many  tunnels  and  over  mountain  torrents,  with  fre- 
quent magnificent  views  of  the  rich,  flat  plain  which  gradually  spreads 
out  hundreds  of  feet  below.  Then  the  valley  narrowed  and  we  came  to 
Llaillai,  the  junction  of  the  line  up  to  Los  Andes  and  over  into  the 
Argentine.  Curving  around  the  higher  mountains,  the  other  branch 
coasts  leisurely  downward,  passing  here  a  long  vineyard,  there  pastures 
bordered  by  rows  of  Lomhardy  poplars  and  dotted  with  cattle,  now  a 
great  estate  belonging  to  a  man  living  in  Paris,  the  stone  mansion  of  his 
administrator  near  at  hand,  the  mountains  forming  the  background  of 
every  vista.  At  Calera  the  "Longitudinal"  sets  out  into  the  arid  north, 
the  fertile  part  of  Chile  quickly  coming  to  an  end  in  this  direction  and 
turning  into  the  dreary  desert  which  is  at  present  the  country's  chief 
source  of  wealth  and  fame.  Then  all  at  once  the  Pacific  I  had  seen 
but  once  since  entering  South  America  two  years  before  burst  out  in 
full  ocean-blue  expanse,  without  even  an  island  to  break  up  the  unpro- 
tected bay  in  which  the  winds  often  raise  havoc.  Below  Vina  del  Mar, 
Chile's  most  fashionable  watering-place,  the  precipitous  hills  come 
down  so  close  to  the  sea  that  there  is  barely  room  for  the  highway, 
railroad,  and  tram  line  to  squeeze  their  way  past  into  the  commercial 
metropolis  and  second  city  of  the  country. 

Valparaiso,  the  greatest  port  not  only  of  Chile  but  of  the  West  Coast 
of  South  America,  is  the  "Vale  of  Paradise"  only  comparatively. 
Built  in  layers  or  strata  up  the  steep  sides  of  the  barren,  shale  coast- 
hills,  it  stretches  for  miles  along  the  amphitheater  of  low  mountains 
that  surround  a  large  semicircular  bay,  behind  which  one  can  see 
jumbled  masses  of  houses  sprawling  away  over  the  many  ridges  until 
these  have  climbed  out  of  sight.  There  is  so  little  shore  at  Valparaiso 
that  there  is  room  in  most  places  only  for  two  or  three  narrow  streets 
following  the  curve  of  the  bay,  and  for  only  one  the  entire  length  of 
the  town,  under  the  edge  of  the  cliffs,  much  of  it  occupied  by  the 
ding}^  two-story,  fcmale-"conducted"  street-cars.  In  the  central  part 
of  town  a  small  space  of  flat  ground  has  been  filled  in  across  one  of  the 
scallops  of  the  bay,  and  on  this  made  land  are  cramped  the  principal 
business  houses  and  the  central  Plaza  Arturo  Prat.  It  is  here  that  the 
earthquakes  do  their  most  appalling  damage.  The  rest  of  the  city 
climbs  steeply  up  the  shale  hills  overhanging  the  business  section,  in  a 
jumble  of  buildings  which  give  the  town  its  only  picturesque  and 
unique  feature.    To  get  "top  side,"  where  the  majority  of  the  Vale  of 


98  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Paradise  dwellers  live,  there  are  escalators,  or,  more  properly,  "lifts," 
since  the  majority  of  the  largest  foreign  colony  on  the  West  Coast  are 
English.  That  is,  every  little  way  along  the  cliff  are  two  cars  at 
opposite  ends  of  a  cable,  which  climb  the  slopes  at  precarious  angles, 
though  they  are  level  inside,  in  about  two  minutes  at  a  cost  of  ten 
centavos.  For  those  who  lack  the  requisite  two  cents,  and  for  cautious 
persons  who  will  not  risk  their  lives  on  the  escalators,  several  stairway 
streets  rise  in  zigzag  above  row  after  row  of  sheet-iron  roofs  to  the 
upper  stories  of  the  town.  During  this  ascent  the  whole  city  spreads 
out  below,  all  the  panorama  of  Valparaiso  and  its  semicircular  bay, 
the  latter  speckled  with  hundreds  of  steamers,  "wind-jammers,"  and 
small  craft,  each  far  enough  from  the  others  to  be  ready  to  dash  un- 
hampered into  the  safety  of  the  open  sea  when  the  wild  southwest 
gales  sweep  in  upon  them.  The  Chileans  formed  some  time  ago  the 
courageous  project  of  having  an  English  company  protect  this  great 
open  roadstead  with  a  huge  breakwater;  but  thousands  of  mammoth 
concrete  blocks  have  so  far  been  dropped  into  the  seemingly  bottomless 
harbor,  leaving  no  visible  trace,  and  now  there  are  floated  out  hollow 
concrete  structures  of  150- foot  dimensions.  Once  on  top  there  are  other 
street-cars,  and  more  climbing  to  do,  if  one  wishes  to  go  anywhere  in 
particular,  though  nothing  as  steep  as  the  face  of  the  cliff  itself.  Here 
may  be  seen  Vifia  del  Mar,  a  broad  expanse  of  the  Pacific,  the  aerial 
best  residences  of  Valparaiso,  and  a  picturesque  tangle  of  poorer 
houses  stringing  away  up  the  backs  of  the  many  verdureless  ridges 
into  the  arid,  uninhabited  country. 

The  earth,  like  the  sea,  casts  up  on  its  beaches  much  human  drift- 
wood. Valparaiso  is  no  exception  to  this  rule,  and  here  may  be  found 
wanderers,  beachcombers,  and  roustabouts  of  all  nationalities.  Primi- 
tive landing  facilities  give  its  rascally  boatmen  the  whip-hand  over 
arriving  or  departing  travelers.  Many  languages  are  spoken,  English 
not  the  least  important  among  them.  Along  the  docks  the  roto  steve- 
dore works  barefoot  and  bare-legged  even  in  the  winter  season ;  over 
all  the  town  rests  a  pall  of  aggressive,  rather  conscienceless  commerce 
which  offsets  its  scenic  beauties.  The  Chilean  is  not  a  particularly 
pleasant  fellow  at  best ;  down  at  his  principal  seaport  he  is  even  below 
the  average  in  this  respect.  Impudent  and  grasping,  unpleasantly 
blase  from  his  contact  with  the  lower  strata  of  the  outside  world — but 
all  this  one  forgets  in  watching  the  red  sun  sink  into  the  Pacific  from 
the  imperiale  of  a  street-car  winding  close  along  the  edge  of  the  sea,  or 


CHILEAN  LANDSCAPES  9§ 

when  the  lights  of  the  town,  piled  into  the  lower  sky,  fade  away  as  the 
traveler  turns  inland  and  climbs  back  up  into  the  Andes. 

From  the  squalid  Alameda  Station  of  Santiago  ar.other  express  sped 
southward  through  rows  of  those  slender  Lombardy  poplars  that  are 
a  feature  of  any  landscape  of  lower  Chile.  The  broad  central  valley, 
distinct  from  the  arid  northern  section  and  growing  more  and  more 
fertile  from  the  capital  southward,  with  ever  more  frequent  streams 
pouring  down  from  the  range  on  the  east  to  add  to  its  productiveness, 
stretches  almost  floor-flat  for  more  than  five  hundred  miles  to  where 
the  narrow  country  breaks  up  into  islands.  In  this  autumn  season 
vineyards  and  cornfields  stood  sear  and  shriveled.  The  slightly  rolling 
country  had  an  indistinct  brown  tint  under  a  gray,  yet  illuminated  sky, 
the  valley  reaching  from  the  all  but  invisible  Pacific  hills  to  the  jagged, 
snow-capped  Andean  wall,  like  an  irregular  dull-wlnte  line  painted 
along  the  canvas  of  the  sky  some  little  distance  above  the  horizon^ 
San  Bernardo,  a  summer  colony,  was  now  a  large  cluster  of  closed 
houses  surrounded  by  brown  vineyards  touched  here  and  there  with  a 
deep  red,  as  of  poison  ivy.  A  few  bushy  trees,  some  still  green,  the 
rest  yellow,  were  half-visible  on  the  left ;  now  and  then  an  evergreen 
grove  broke  the  prevailing  color  with  the  verdant  emerald  of  firs,  shad- 
ing away  through  all  the  tints  of  green  to  late-autumn  saffron,  a  hazy 
world  spreading  away  on  either  hand  and  rising  beyond  to  the  Cordil- 
lera lying  dim-white  under  a  new  fall  of  snow. 

Paralleling  the  railroad  were  good  highways,  sometimes  with  high 
banks,  more  often  lined  with  hedges,  which  added  a  suggestion  of 
England  to  the  general  atmosphere  of  California  in  November,  Along 
these  roads  were  many  ox-carts,  the  drivers  walking  ahead  a'ld  punch- 
ing back  over  their  shoulders  at  the  animals  with  sharp  goads.  There 
was  color  in  the  ponchos,  often  in  the  other  clothing  of  the  lower 
classes  here,  especially  among  the  huasos,  as  the  gaucho  is  known  in 
Chile,  and  this  color  seemed  to  be  in  exact  ratio  to  the  Indian  blood, 
not  of  the  individual,  but  of  a  given  locality.  Dust  was  everywhere. 
We  passed  numerous  large  corrals  bearing  the  sign  "Ferias  Rejionales," 
some  with  cattle  in  them,  all  surrounded  by  an  elevated  promenade 
from  which  prospective  buyers  could  examine  the  stock.  Horses  and 
cattle  shipped  north  in  freight  trains  all  had  pasted  on  their  rumps  a 
paper  bearing  their  destination.  Towns  were  frequent  and  sometimes 
large,  and  there  was  much  freight  as  well  as  passenger  traffic,  no  doubt 
because  Chile  is  like  Egypt  in  that  there  is  but  one  route  up  and  down 


lOO 


WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 


the  country,  here  following  the  elevated  central  valley  between  th«" 
Andes  and  the  sea. 

At  every  station  of  any  size  groups  of  women  and  girls  offered  fol 
sale  fruit,  bread,  sweetmeats,  and  the  like.  They  were  particularly 
well  stocked  with  grapes ;  native  apples  were  plentiful,  Chile  being  the 
only  land  in  South  America  which  grows  them;  not  a  few  sold  the 
pretty  red  copihiie,  the  national  flower  of  Chile,  a  long  bell-shaped  blos' 
som  growing  on  a  climbing  plant  of  deep  roots.  The  movements  of 
these  women  were  lively  and  vivacious  compared  with  those  of  the 
higher  Andes  of  more  northern  west-coast  countries.  Each  wore  a 
white  dressing-gown  over  many  layers  of  dark  clothes,  and  most  of 
them  were  decorated  with  earrings  or  necklaces  of  the  red-and-black 
beans  called  gimymros  with  which  I  had  grown  familiar  in  tropical 
Bolivia.  These  berries  are  supposed  to  bring  luck,  or  at  least  a  man, 
and  the  Chilean  woman  of  the  ignorant  class  will  sell  her  only  posses- 
sion for  a  fev/  of  them.  Apple  and  cherry  orchards  flanked  the  track 
here  and  there,  many  of  them  bordered  by  blackberry  hedges  stripped 
now  of  their  fruit.  Rather  drab  farmhouses,  hung  with  withered  rose 
vines,  alternated  with  curiously  un-American  wheat  or  straw  stacks. 
Gradually  cultivation  and  villages  decreased,  and  an  Arizona-like  coun- 
try wormed  its  way  into  the  plain  in  arid  patches.  Here  grapes  were 
still  offered  for  sale,  but  one  might  easily  have  mistaken  them  for 
raisins. 

We  passed  several  branch  lines  leading  off  toward  the  Pacific,  and 
a  few  shorter  ones  climbing  a  little  way  up  the  flanks  of  the  Andes.  I 
dropped  off  at  the  fourth  of  these  junctions,  in  Talca,  a  large  town 
wath  far  too  many  churches  and  the  concomitant  squalor,  poverty,  and 
ignorance.  The  plaster  wss  beginning  to  peel  off  in  places  from  the 
adobe  faqade  of  the  big,  ostensibly  cut-stone  building  facing  the  central 
plaza.  Here,  as  in  all  Chile,  one  was  struck  again  by  society's  waste 
of  its  resources,— robust  men  in  the  prime  of  life  scurrying  about  with 
baskets  of  fruit  or  newspapers  for  sale,  much  potential  energy  fritter- 
ing away  its  time  for  want  of  occupation.  "Los  Boi  Escouts"  of  Talca 
were  announcing  a  benefit  performance  that  evening,  but  as  this  did  not 
promise  sufficient  interest  to  make  up  for  spending  a  night  in  so  dismal 
a  place,  I  went  on  to  the  considerable  town  of  Chilian.  Here  it  had 
been  raining  and  the  unpaved  streets  were  full  of  miniature  ponds 
through  v.hich  I  picked  my  way  to  a  hotel  where  I  paid  three  dollars 
for  a  bed — and  not  much  of  a  bed  at  that. 

In  stories  I  had  heard  Chile  was  noted  for  its  low  prices.    If  ever 


CHILEAN  LANDSCAPES  loi 

it  had  that  particular  charm  it  has  now  disappeared,  at  least  for  the 
traveler.  The  hard  little  apples  sold  at  the  stations  cost  as  much  as 
good  ones  in  New  York ;  diminutive  loaves  of  bread  were  nearly  as 
high  as  a  whole  loaf  at  home.  Establishments  masquerading  under  the 
name  of  "hotels"  are  plentiful;  if  there  were  one-fourth  as  many  clean, 
honest,  and  well  conducted  it  would  be  a  decided  improvement.  To 
pay  an  average  of  twenty  pesos  a  day  in  the  squalor  of  most  Chilean 
hotels  would  be  mishap  enough ;  the  doctoring  to  which  one's  bill  is 
invariably  subjected  makes  the  experience  all  the  more  painful. 
Though  the  daily  rate  purports  to  cover  all  service,  morning  coffee  and 
rolls  are  always  charged  for  as  an  extra.  So  also  is  fruit,  at  twenty 
times  what  it  sells  for  in  the  market  around  the  corner.  Baths,  which 
are  so  slow  in  being  prepared  as  to  wear  out  the  patience  of  most 
foreign  guests,  cost  several  pesos  each  time  they  are  ordered,  whether 
they  are  taken  or  not.  The  crowning  trick  is  to  make  out  the  bill  by 
separate  items,  if  one  has  had  the  audacity  to  ask  for  the  daily  rate  in 
advance,  thus  doubling  it ;  or,  if  one  protests  against  this  system,  the 
next  one  is  to  contend  that  the  day  begins  at  a  certain  fixed  hour, 
which  is  always  on  the  opposite  side  of  the  clock  from  that  at  which 
the  traveler  arrives,  and  that  the  first  and  last  meal  each  constitute  a 
full  day,  with  the  result  that  the  man  who  is  continually  traveling  pays 
for  sixty  days  a  month  in  hotels  even  though  he  spends  some  half  of 
his  time  on  trains. 

It  was  wet  and  sloppy  and  all  the  world  was  drowned  in  a  dense 
fog  when  I  set  off  again  at  dawn.  Everyone  who  owned  them  wore 
heavy  overcoats  and  neckscarfs,  keeping  even  their  noses  covered. 
One  would  have  fancied  a  demand  that  trains  be  heated  would  be  in 
order  in  such  a  climate,  but  if  the  lack  of  artificial  heat  is  at  times 
unpleasant  it  is  healthful,  and  the  traveler  in  South  America  is  likely 
to  return  with  a  prejudice  against  it.  At  San  Rosendo  I  caught  a 
branch  line  along  the  shining  Uio-Bio,  the  largest  river  of  Chile,  and 
followed  it  northwestward  to  the  coast,  the  sun  at  last  breaking  through 
and  suddenly  flooding  all  the  scene  as  the  train  took  to  rounding  many 
rolling  hills  covered  with  scrub  growth.  The  huaso  was  everywhere 
busy  with  his  fall  plowing,  his  ox-drawn  wooden  implement  as  primi- 
tive as  those  of  Peru,  except  for  its  iron  point.  Here  there  was  con- 
siderable eucalyptus,  the  foster  child  of  the  Andean  tree  world,  though 
the  poplar  was  more  in  evidence  and  the  weeping  willow  frequent. 

I  spent  a  day  in  Concepcion,  third  city  of  Chile,  a  brisk  and  mildly 
pretty  town  scattered  over  a  hillside,  center  of  a  large  grain  district 


102  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

with  coal  fields  near,  hence  the  site  o£  many  factories,  flour-mills,  even 
sugar  refineries,  which  import  their  crude  product  from  Peru,  Though 
it  is  the  scene  of  considerable  modern  industry,  and  has  the  usual  two- 
story,  beskirted  tram-cars,  brilliant  ponchos  and  gaunt  oxen  dragging 
clumsy,  creaking  carts  are  to  be  seen  in  its  main  streets.  A  splendid 
view  of  the  town  may  be  had  from  the  Cerro  Caracol,  crowning  point 
of  a  long  ridge  of  rolling  hills  of  reddish  soil,  yet  covered  with  grass, 
so  rare  in  South  America,  and  much  of  it  with  a  thick  fir  forest.  A 
"snail"  roadway  winds  upw^ard,  and  immediately  at  the  climber's  feet 
spreads  out  the  entire  city,  flat  and  low  for  the  most  part,  with  the 
plethora  of  bulking  churches  common  to  all  Chilean  towns.  There  are 
many  Germans  in  Concepcion,  south  of  which  they  grow  ever  more 
numerous.  Along  the  Avenue  Pedro  de  A'aldivia,  squeezed  between 
the  river  and  the  hills  in  the  outskirts,  live  scores  of  men  of  this 
nationality  who  came  out  less  than  half  a  century  ago  as  simple  clerks 
and  who  now  have  sumptuous  mansions  and  large  estates — quintas  they 
are  called  in  Chile — a  single  row  of  them  eighteen  blocks  long  on  this 
one  avenue  boasting  such  names  as  "Thuringia"  and  "Die  Lorelei" 
and  the  top-heav}^  architecture  which  goes  with  them.  In  Arauco 
province,  a  bit  to  the  south,  with  a  private  railroad  running  into  Con- 
cepcion, are  some  of  the  few^  coal  mines  in  South  America,  Chile  being 
virtually  the  only  country  on  that  continent  not  entirely  dependent  on 
Newcastle  or  Australia  for  this  sinew  of  industry.  It  seems  to  be  a 
soft  surface  coal,  mainly  productive  of  smoke,  great  clouds  of  which 
frequently  wipe  out  the  beauties  of  the  landscape  in  this  vicinity. 

Talcahuano,  six  miles  farther  northwest,  is  on  Concepcion  Bay, 
national  naval  rendezvous  and  the  best  harbor  in  Chile,  being  seven 
miles  across  and  bottled  up  by  the  island  Quiriquina.  The  tow'n, 
thrown  around  the  inner  bay  like  a  wrap  about  a  throat,  with  pretty 
residential  hills  climbing  up  close  behind  the  modest  central  plaza,  the 
outskirts  scattered  far  and  wide  over  a  rolling,  verdant  countr}-,  has 
considerable  shipping,  but  the  Pacific  is  seen  from  it  only  through  the 
rifts  of  islands  and  promontories.  Forty  years  ago  American  whalers 
often  entered  this  harbor,  and  some  of  the  w'ealthy  families  of  the 
vicinity  to-day  are  descended  from  the  deserting  sailors  they  left  behind. 

In  Talcahuano  I  found  an  American  consul  who  had  been  there  for 
decades,  evidently  long  since  forgotten  by  the  authorities  at  home.  Of 
the  many  tales  he  had  to  tell  the  most  picturesque  were  those  of  his 
early  days  as  a  guano  digger  on  the  west  coast,  but  he  was  more  filJed 
with  the  alleged  rascality  of  the  Germans  in  Chile.     There  were  117 


CHILEAN  LANDSCAPES  103 

Concepcion,  he  asserted,  forty  German  business  houses  as  against  four 
English  and  no  American — or  perhaps  I  should  say  "North  American," 
for  th.e  Chilean  grows  more  enraged  than  any  of  his  neighbors  at  our 
assumption  of  a  term  to  which  he  considers  himself  equally  entitled. 
The  consul  was  greatly  grieved  to  see  the  Germans  steadily  taking 
away  the  little  trade  Americans  once  had,  driving  out  even  our  stoves 
and  agricultural  machinery  from  what  had  formerly  been  a  United 
States  stronghold.  But  the  Germans  were  more  apt  to  make  things  to 
fit  local  tastes,  or  the  customer  seldom  had  any  fixed  notion  of  what  he 
wanted  and  fell  easy  prey  to  the  clever  and  unscrupulous  German 
salesman.  The  consul  had  recently  discovered  a  German  house  secretly 
sending  to  the  Fatherland  a  binder  and  a  reaper  which  it  had  imported 
from  New  York,  evidently  because  direct  importation  would  have 
called  official  attention  to  the  plan  of  copying  the  machines  for  the 
South  American  trade.  He  had  recently  bought  what  purported  to 
be  a  reputable  implement  made  in  the  United  States  and  known  by 
the  trademark  "Eureka."  It  worked  badly,  however,  and  the  parts 
broke  so  easily,  that  he  finally  examined  it  more  closely  and  found  that 
it  was  really  a  "Hureka,"  made  in  Germany.  Though  Americans  and 
English  are  hard  to  assimilate,  clannish,  little  inclined  to  take  Chilean 
wives,  the  Germans  marry  freely  with  the  natives  and  gain  much  com- 
mercial and  political  advantage  from  such  alliances.  The  Chilean-born 
children  of  Germans  are  legally  Chileans,  but  at  heart,  according  to 
the  consul,  they  are  still  Germans.  The  Teutons  have  driven  the  na- 
tives out  of  all  important  business,  except  in  the  case  of  wealthy  land- 
owners, and  these  usually  live  in  Paris  and  intrust  their  holdings  to  a 
German  or  other  foreign  manager.  Our  forsaken  representative  was 
also  highly  incensed  at  "the  nonsense  of  American  business  men  run- 
ning down  to  South  America  in  droves,  making  themselves  laughing- 
stocks  among  the  natives  by  their  geographical  ignorance,  their  man- 
ners and  public  drinking,  and  only  stirring  up  the  Germans  to  greater 
underground  efforts." 

Though  all  Chile  below  Santiago  is  noted  for  its  agriculture,  its 
fertility  increases  with  every  degree  southward.  South  Chile,  which 
may  be  reckoned  as  beginning  at  the  Bio-Bio  River,  where  the  vine- 
yards end,  is  an  almost  virgin  land,  only  a  fraction  of  which  is  as  yet 
under  the  plow.  The  Bio-Bio  marks  the  point  below  which  the  Span- 
iards were  never  able  to  make  a  permanent  conquest,  for  the  region 
hehw  it  was  the  home  of  the  most  valiant  Indians  of  South  America, 
a  race  much  more  like  our  own  untamable  red-skins  than  the  slinking 


104  WORKING  NORTH  FROAI  PATAGONIA 

tribes  farther  to  the  north.  The  river  was  finally  agreed  upon  as  the 
southern  limits  of  vSpain's  authority,  and  such  it  remained  until  that 
had  wholly  disappeared  from  the  American  continent.  After  the  inde- 
pendence of  Chile  the  republican  government  confirmed  the  valiant 
]\Iapuches,  as  the  Araucanians  call  themselves,  in  their  claim  to  regard 
the  Bio-Dio  as  a  frontier.  It  was  not  until  forty  years  ago,  when  at 
last  the  white  man's  firewater  had  done  what  the  Spaniards  were  never 
able  to  do,  that  the  Araucanians  were  at  last  pushed  back  into  limited 
reservations  and  Araucania  formally  taken  under  the  rule  of  Santiago. 
The  land  was  divided  up  among  white  settlers,  and  when  the  Indians 
objected  the  central  government  "sent  out  soldiers  to  shoot  down  the 
rebels,  following  just  the  same  policy  as  you  did  in  the  United  States," 
as  a  Chilean  told  me  in  a  naive,  matter-of-fact  way. 

The  "first-class''  coach  in  which  I  crossed  the  Bio-Bio,  not  so  long 
before  a  proud  product  of  St.  Louis,  was  a  rattling  old  wreck,  the  floor 
so  sloppy  and  wet  one  needed  rubbers,  its  window  panes  either  broken 
or  missing  entirely,  some  of  them  pasted  over  with  paper,  the  seats 
more  worn  and  dirty  than  those  on  a  backv^oods  branch  line  in  the 
United  States.  As  the  weather  had  grown  steadily  colder  from  Talca 
southward,  everyone  on  board  was  wrapped  and  overcoated  beyond 
recognition.  We  moved  slowly  through  a  woodless,  brown,  rolling 
country  almost  invisible  for  the  rain.  In  the  early  afternoon  the  train 
crept  cautiously  across  a  bridge  far  up  above  a  small  but  powerful 
stream,  amid  green  hills  of  plump,  indistinct  outline.  The  reason  for 
the  caution  soon  appeared.  Just  north  of  the  city  of  Victoria  we  were 
suddenly  routed  out  into  a  cold  rain  flung  against  us  by  a  roaring  wind 
like  tlie  spray  from  an  angry  sea,  and  found  ourselves  at  the  edge  of  a 
mighty  chasm.  At  the  bottom,  in  and  about  the  stream  which  raged 
through  it  far  below,  lay  the  wreckage  of  a  freight  train  that  had 
dropped  with  the  bridge  a  month  before,  killing  the  crew.  Across  this 
chasm  swung  a  narrow,  wire-suspended  foot-bridge  a  furlong  in  length, 
which  swayed  drunkenly  back  and  forth  as  the  stream  of  wet  and 
shivering  passengers,  a  few  women  and  aged,  infirm  men  among  them, 
crept  fearfully  across  it,  followed  by  all  the  boys  and  ragamuffins  of 
the  vicinity  carrying  the  hand  baggage — no  white-collar  Chilean  of 
course,  would  carry  his  own  even  in  case  of  wreck.  We  were  bedrag- 
gled indeed  when  w^e  climbed  out  of  the  mud  and  rain  into  another 
train,  and  another  good  hour  was  lost  in  transferring  the  mails  and 
the  heavier,  fare-paying  baggage  before  we  were  off  again. 

I  found  Temuco,  up  to  the  present  generation  the  capital  of  the  land 


CHILEAN  LANDSCAPES  105 

from  which  the  sturdy  Araucanians  were  at  length  dispossessed,  the 
most  interesting  town  in  Chile.  It  was  more  nearly  like  the  cities  of 
the  Andean  highlands,  with  something  Mexican  about  it  also,  thanks 
to  its  mixture  of  dirt,  poverty,  and  the  "picturesqueness"  of  which  the 
tourist  rants.  The  Mapuche  Indians  are  thick-set,  the  women  espe- 
cially so,  broad-faced,  with  a  reddish  tinge  showing  through  a  light 
copper  skin,  due  perhaps  to  the  colder  climate  of  their  temperate  home- 
land. Some  of  the  women  were  comfortably  fat;  they  wore  their 
coarse  hair  in  two  braids,  a  band  of  colored  cloth  or  silver  coins  about 
their  round  heads,  this  sometimes  securing  a  gay  head-kerchief  flying 
in  the  wind.  The  mantos  about  their  shoulders  were  usually  a  dull 
red.  their  skirts  a  true  "hobble,"  being  a  simple  strip  of  cloth  wrapped 
tightly  around  the  waist  and  tucked  in,  with  the  raw  edge  down  one 
leg.  Their  feet  were  bare,  chubby,  and  by  no  means  clean,  though 
more  nearly  so  than  those  of  the  typical  Andean  Indian.  The  children 
ran  about  bare-legged  for  all  the  wintry  air.  The  older  Indians  of 
both  sexes  had  rather  dissipated  features,  as  if  the  white  man's  fire- 
water were  still  doing  its  work  among  them.  The  men  wore  a  mildly 
gay  short  poncho,  some  still  home- woven,  most  of  them  made  in  Ger- 
many, flannel  drawers,  a  black  or  near-black  skirt  brought  together 
Detween  the  legs,  shapeless  felt  hats,  and  black  leather  boots  of  light 
material.  The  more  poverty-stricken  wore  a  rude  moccasin  and  any 
head-gear  available,  even  the  cast  off  stiflf  straw  hats  of  the  summer- 
time fiitrcs  of  Temuco;  and  May  is  not  the  month  for  straw  hats  in 
southern  Chile.  The  nearest  Indian  settlement  is  but  half  an  hour's 
ride  from  Temuco,  and  some  of  the  Indian  women  rode  into  town  on 
horses  decorated  with  as  many  trappings  and  large  silver  ornaments 
as  themselves ;  others  carried  baskets  on  their  backs,  with  the  leather 
band  supporting  it  drawn  tightly  across  chest  or  forehead.  Babies 
were  not  carried  on  the  mothers'  backs,  that  custom  having  disappeared 
where  I  turned  eastward  from  the  Andes  across  tropical  Bolivia. 

The  modern  Araucanian's  land  is  secured  to  him,  and  an  official 
of  the  Chilean  Government,  known  as  "Protector  of  the  Indians,"  sees 
to  it  that  the  acreage  he  owns  to-day  is  not  alienated.  But  the  tribe  is 
dying,  like  all  Indians  in  contact  with  European  civilization,  and  the 
time  is  not  many  generations  distant  when  the  rest  of  his  land  will  gd 
to  the  white  man.  To  all  appearances  the  x\raucanian  has  lost  most 
of  the  warlike  courage  for  which  his  ancestors  were  famous,  though 
he  has  by  no  means  degenerated  to  the  cringing  creature  one  finds  in 
Quito  or  Cuzco.    As  in  those  cities,  shop-keepers  are  obliged  to  learn 


io6  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

the  tongue  of  their  most  numerous  customers,  and  Araucanian  was 
heard  on  every  hand,  among  whites  as  well  as  Indians.  Some  of  the 
latter  could  speak  nothing  else,  though  now  and  then  a  familiar  Spanish 
word  broke  out  of  the  jumble  of  sound.  The  Mapuches  had  some  of 
the  superstition  of  the  Ouichuas  and  Aymaras  toward  the  "little  magic 
box  with  one  eye,"  and  for  the  first  time  in  months  I  was  forced  to 
resort  to  simple  trickery  to  catch  my  chosen  pictures. 

Rain  was  almost  incessant  in  Temuco,  and  the  mud  so  deep  that  the 
better-to-do  used  sue  cos,  wooden  clogs  on  which  were  nailed  imita- 
tion patent-leather  uppers  in  any  of  the  little  shops  devoted  to  that 
industry.  The  next  most  familiar  sight  was  that  of  oxen  pulling  solid 
wooden  wheeled  wagons,  straining  laboriously  through  the  sloughs 
called  streets  until  one  fancied  the  animals,  with  the  yoke  across  their 
brows  all  day,  must  end  each  night  with  a  raging  headache. 

Below  Temuco  the  train  crossed  several  considerable  rivers.  Long 
stretches  of  stumps  and  scattered  wooden  shacks  suggested  the  days 
of  Lincoln  and  Daniel  Boone.  Much  rough  lumber  was  piled  at  the 
flooded  stations,  which  served  ugly  frontier  hamlets  tucked  away 
among  rolling  hills  once  thick  wooded  and  still  so  in  places.  Curiously 
enough  this  more  southern  section  of  Chile  is  an  older  country,  in  the 
settler's  sense,  than  that  about  Temuco.  Seventy  years  ago,  long  be- 
fore it  was  able  to  force  the  stronghold  of  the  central  valley  of  Arau- 
cania,  the  Chilean  Government  made  an  entry  far  to  the  south,  catching 
the  Indians  in  the  rear  and  settling  with  foreign  immigrants  wide  areas 
of  what  are  now  the  provinces  of  Valdivia  and  Llanquihije.  The 
town  of  Valdivia  and  several  other  strategic  points,  chiefly  on  the  coast, 
where  the  Spaniards  had  erected  forts  and  established  small  precarious 
settlements,  were  moribund  when  Santiago  turned  its  attention  to  the 
region  in  the  middle  of  the  last  century.  The  coming  of  European 
colonists  has  given  the  district  new  life  and  considerable  prosperity. 

The  methods  of  Chile  in  settling  this  wilderness  of  the  south  were 
simple.  An  agent  in  Germany  sought  colonists ;  an  agent  in  Chile  was 
sent  to  Valdivia  to  receive  them  when  they  landed.  The  first-comers 
were  placed  on  the  Isla  de  la  Teja,  where  they  would  be  secure  against 
possible  attack  by  the  Indians  on  the  mainland.  There  are  still  a 
number  of  German  factories  on  that  island,  the  inevitable  brewery 
among  them.  When  the  colonial  agent  was  forced  to  look  farther 
to  the  unknown  south  for  more  land,  he  found  nothing  but  matted  for- 
est. A  trusted  renegade  Indian  named  Pichi-Juan  was  given  thirty 
pesos  fiiertes  (in  those  days  nearly  fifteen  dollars)  to  burn  this  pri- 


CHILEAN  LANDSCAPES  107 

meval  woodland.  Smoke  clouds,  visible  from  Valdivia,  rose  for  three 
months,  and  at  the  end  of  that  time  a  strip  forty-five  miles  long;  and 
fifteen  wide,  from  Chan-Chan  to  the  Andes,  was  ready  for  the  colonists. 

All  the  way  to  \'aldivia  the  product  of  the  saw  was  in  evidence, — 
rivers  of  planks,  seas  of  squared  logs.  New  little  towns,  built  entirely 
of  wood,  and  visibly  growing,  dotted  the  line  of  the  railroad ;  in  small 
clearings,  about  shacks  as  rough  as  those  of  our  Tennessee  mountains, 
the  soil  that  had  been  turned  up  was  rich  black  loam ;  the  scat- 
tered inhabitants  had  the  hardy,  self-sufficient,  hopeful  air  of  all 
frontiersmen.  Then  great  damp  forests,  strangely  like  those  of  the 
far  north,  grew  almost  continuous  on  either  hand.  I  stood  for  half  the 
afternoon  on  the  back  platform  of  our  wreck  of  a  first-class  car, 
watching  the  cold,  wet  world  race  away  into  the  north,  and  the 
temperate  zone  night,  so  different  from  that  of  the  tropics,  settle  slowly 
down. 

In  the  darkness  we  came  to  a  little  station  called  Valdivia,  but  it  was 
merely  the  landing-place  for  the  small  steamer  to  the  town  of  that 
name,  which  lay  twelve  miles  up  the  river.  It  is  named  for  Pedro  de 
Valdivia,  a  companion  of  Pizarro  in  Peru  and  afterward  conqueror  of 
Chile — with  reservations ;  for  he  had  no  such  luck  against  the  Arau- 
canians  as  against  the  docile  Quichuas  farther  north  and  finally  lost 
his  life  in  his  efforts  to  subdue  them.  But  Valdivia  is  Spanish  only  in 
name ;  in  nearly  all  else  it  is  extremely  Germanic,  so  different  from  the 
typical  South  American  town  that  one  seems  suddenly  transported  to 
another  continent.  Well  built,  two  stories  high,  new  and  clean,  without 
a  suggestion  of  luxury,  yet  comfortable  as  a  town  of  the  north  temper- 
ate zone,  it  might  easily  have  been  mistaken  for  one  in  the  newer 
sections  of  Washington  or  Oregon.  Most  remarkable  of  all,  at  least  to 
a  man  who  had  been  traveling  for  years  in  lands  of  adobe,  brick,  or 
stone,  it  was  made  entirely  of  wood. 

Saw-mill  whistles  awoke  me  at  dawn.  The  sun,  after  a  long  struggle 
with  the  dense  clouds  rising  from  the  unseen  sea  not  far  to  the  west, 
won  the  day,  and  every  living  thing  was  visibly  grateful  for  its  benign 
countenance,  for  continual  rain  is  the  customary  lot  of  this  part  of 
Chile  at  this  season.  For  once  the  weather  was  fine — except  under- 
foot. The  streets  and  roads  of  \'aldivia  were  literally  impassable, 
with  the  exception  of  those  that  were  laid  with  plank  floors,  planks 
which  would  have  been  worth  almost  their  weight  in  silver  in  most 
of  the  continent.  Heavy  rains  bring  thick  forests,  however,  and  here 
wood   served  every  possible  purpose.     Wooden   fences   v/ere  every- 


io8  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

where,  wooden  sidewalks  drummed  under  my  heels  with  an  almost 
forgotten  sound;  houses  were  covered  with  a  rough  species  of  clap- 
boarding;  even  the  few  buildings  that  seemed  at  a  distance  to  be  of 
stone  turned  out  to  be  made  of  wood  tinned  over,  the  roofs  covered 
with  lumber  rather  than  shingles,  either  because  Valdivia  does  not 
know  how  to  make  the  latter  or  because  boards  are  cheaper  than  labor. 
The  unfloored  streets  were  incredible  sloughs  of  mud.  One  was 
named  the  Calle  Intrepido,  and  the  man  would  have  been  intrepid  in- 
deed who  ventured  out  into  it.  A  few  aged  hacks,  smeared  with  mud 
to  their  wooden  roofs,  plied  along  the  few  principal  streets  between 
the  Germanized  plaza  and  the  rather  wide  river  which  the  town  faces. 
To  enter  almost  any  shop  was  to  be  suddenly  transported  to  the  little 
towns  of  the  Harz  or  the  Black  Forest,  though  tlie  shop-keeper  was 
likely  to  address  a  stranger  in  Spanish,  usually  with  more  or  less  for- 
eign accent. 

Isolated  for  a  considerable  period  after  their  first  arrival  in  southern 
Chile,  the  Germans  began  to  move  northward  as  the  Chileans  moved 
south,  and  the  hostile  Indians  were  squeezed  between  them.  With  the 
advent  of  the  railroad,  which  reached  Temuco  a  short  generation  ago 
and  Valdivia  some  time  later,  the  Chileanizing  of  the  immigrants  and 
the  territory  advanced  rapidly,  and  even  before  the  World  War  direct 
relations  between  these  settlers  of  Teutonic  blood  and  the  Fatherland 
seem  to  have  been  rare.  Yet  the  harsh  German  speech  echoes  every- 
where through  the  trains  and  hotels  of  South  Chile  to-day,  though  the 
German-Chuean  speaks  Spanish  as  well  as  he  does  the  tongue  of  his 
grandfather  colonist,  exercises  all  the  rights  of  Chilean  citizenship, 
and  frequently  marries  into  Chilean  families.  His  ways  are  some- 
what enigmatical  sometimes  ludicrous,  to  the  Latin-sired  native,  how- 
ever, and  for  all  his  industry,  he  is  to  a  certain  degree  the  butt  of  the 
older  society.  What  we  know  as  an  "Irish  bull''  is  called  in  Chile  a 
ciiento  alemdn — a  "German  yarn." 

Be'.ow  Valdivia  lies  a  great  potato-growing  country,  occupying  the 
site  of  the  burned  forest,  now  a  rich,  rolling  agricultural  section. 
Blackberries  were  thick  along  the  railroad.  The  centers  of  this  un- 
couth, wood-built,  prosperous  region  are  the  large  German  towns  of 
La  Union  and  Osorno,  towns  in  which  German  was  the  language  of 
the  schools  and  almost  all  the  local  officials  bore  Teutonic  names. 
From  Temuco  southward  the  railroad  had  been  running  out  like  a 
dying  stream,  with  ever  decreasing  traffic.  I  left  Osorno  bv  the  daily 
freight,  which  dragged  behind  it  one  passenger  car  with  two  long  up- 


CHILEAN  LANDSCAPES  109 

bolstered  seats  along  its  sides  serving  also  as  a  caboose  and  densely 
packed  with  well-dressed  men  entirely  European  in  origin.  Several 
young  men  were  plainly  of  German  parentage,  yet  they  spoke  Castilian 
together,  and  one  such  pair  was  wondering  how  they  could  escape  the 
year  of  compulsory  military  service  in  Chile,  "since  our  fathers  came 
out  here  largely  to  avoid  such  slavery."  Rail  fences,  rude  cabins  in 
rough  little  clearings,  rolling  hills  scratched  over  with  wooden  plows, 
countrymen  in  ever  thicker  ponchos  and  with  but  rare  traces  of  Indian 
blood,  burned  woods  covered  with  charred  stumps  and  grazing  cattle, 
lined  the  way  on  this  journey.  The  railroad,  here  only  a  few  months 
old,  faded  to  a  little  grass-grown  track.  Then  the  land  opened  out, 
flattening  away  to  the  edge  of  Lake  Llanquihiie,  and  I  came  to  the  end 
of  railroading  and  mainland  in  Chile. 

Puerto  Montt,  more  than  a  thousand  kilometers  south  of  Santiago, 
and  capital  of  the  province  of  Llanquihiie,  below  which  Chile  breaks 
up  into  islands  terminating  in  Tierra  del  Fuego  and  Cape  Horn,  was 
founded  by  Germans  in  the  middle  of  the  last  century.  It  is  a  quiet 
hamlet  of  three  or  four  thousand  inhabitants,  built  of  planks  or  wooden 
bricks,  in  a  style  reminiscent  of  Switzerland  or  Westphaha,  on  the  edge 
of  an  immense  harbor  which  hopes  some  day  to  serve  as  a  station  of  a 
partly  overland  route  between  Australia  and  Europe.  The  commerce 
of  the  region  is  almost  wholly  in  German  hands,  there  being  but  two 
Chilean  merchants,  while  the  native  population  is  miserable  and  pov- 
erty-stricken. Barefooted  women,  ragged  gamins,  not  a  few  beggars, 
are  to  be  seen  in  the  streets,  and  there  are  far  too  many  shop-keepers 
in  proportion  to  producers.  Here,  too,  may  be  seen  women  on  horse- 
back, wearing  heavy  ponchos  and  wide  brimmed  felt  hats  which  give 
them  a  suggestion  of  misplaced  "cow  girls."  A  short  steamer  trip 
from  the  town  lies  the  large  island  of  Chiloe,  said  to  be  the  original 
home  of  the  potato  and  still  producing  it  in  great  quantities.  Many  of 
the  neat,  well-managed  farms  of  Chiloe  are  owned  by  Boers  who  re- 
fused to  endure  British  rule  after  the  South  African  War,  though  a 
majority  of  the  Chilotes  are  of  old  Spanish  stock  with  a  considerable 
strain  of  Indian  blood. 

I  had  come  more  and  more  to  regret  that  I  had  not  reached  this  wet 
and  shivering  corner  of  the  world  in  the  brilliant  summer-time  of 
Christmas  and  New  Year's.  The  regret  was  all  the  keener  because  it 
was  coupled  with  the  necessity  of  altering  long-laid  plans  and  retracing 
my  steps,  always  an  abhorrence.  From  Puerto  Montt  I  mieht  in 
summer  have  crossed  the  two  Chilean  lakes  of  Llanquihiie  and  Esmer- 


no      WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

aldas,  Laguna  Fria  in  the  Argentine,  and  finally  famous  Nahuel-Haupi, 
and,  with  ten  days'  tramping  across  the  pampas,  have  come  back  to 
Buenos  Aires  by  Neuquen  and  the  "Great  Southern."  But  at  this 
season  such  a  journey  was  impossible  and,  having  no  taste  for  polar 
explorations,  I  let  Puerto  Montt,  in  a  latitude  similar  to  that  of  Boston, 
stand  as  my  ''farthest  south,"  and  turned  tail  and  fled  back  into  the 
warmer  north. 

At  Temuco  I  wired  ahead  for  a  berth  on  the  night  train  to  Santiago. 
The  precaution  was  hardly  necessary.  At  the  end  of  the  train  waiting 
in  San  Rosendo  were  two  brand  new  cars  stencilled  "Pullman  Com- 
pany, Chicago,"  which  had  not  yet  had  time  to  go  to  rack  and  ruin. 
There  were  but  few  passengers  in  the  first  of  them ;  in  the  second  I 
found  myself  entirely  alone.  The  conductor  bowed  low  over  my  pass 
with,  "Will  you  have  a  berth  or  a  stateroom?"  The  porter  was  a 
ragged  roto  such  as  might  have  been  picked  up  at  any  station,  but  he 
lost  no  time  in  making  up  my  private  parlor.  Just  how  much  the  huge 
yearly  deficit  of  the  government  railways  of  Chile  is  due  to  the  hauling 
back  and  forth  of  empty  first-class  cars,  and  the  ease  with  which  gen- 
eral passes  are  granted,  is  of  course  a  question  for  financiers  rather 
than  a  random  wanderer.  Before  I  turned  in,  I  impressed  upon  the 
melancholy  porter  the  necessity  of  calling  me  in  time  to  get  off  at 
Rancagua,  station  for  a  famous  American  copper  mine  up  the  moun- 
tainside to  the  eastward.  He  was  vociferous  in  his  advice  to  me  to 
"lose  care." 

Unfortunately  I  did  so.  By  and  by  I  was  disturbed  by  a  thumping 
on  my  door  that  finally  brought  me  back  to  consciousness.  I  sprang 
up  and — and  heard  the  irresponsible  half-Indian  masquerading  as 
porter  say  in  a  mellifluous  voice : 

"You  wished  to  get  off  at  Rancagua,  senor?  Well,  you  must  hurry, 
for  I  overslept  and  w^e  are  just  pulling  out  of  there."  No  doubt,  being 
a  Chilean  roto,  it  had  never  occurred  to  him  that  his  "gringo"  charge 
had  taken  off  his  clothes  to  sleep.  By  the  time  I  might  have  had  them. 
on  again  we  were  miles  beyond,  and  I  had  gone  back  to  bed.  From 
Santiago  I  hurried  back  to  the  Argentine  so  fast  that  I  paid  in  cash 
the  breath-taking  fare  between  my  two  railroad  passes.  I  was  just 
in  time;  for  the  very  next  train  was  forced  to  back  down  to  Los 
Andes  again,  and  the  transandean  pass  remained  snowed  in  until  the 
following  September. 


CHAPTER  VI 


llRALrrilY   LITTL1-:    URUGUAY 


ONE  cold  June  evening,  with  more  than  a  hundred  days  and  eight 
hundred  miles  of  travel  in  Chile  and  the  Argentine  behind  me,  I 
took  final  leave  of  Buenos  Aires — not  v^'ithout  regret,  for  all  ita 
ostentatious  artificialities.  Or  it  may  be  that  my  sorrow  was  at  parting 
from  the  good  friends  with  whom  I  had  been  wont  to  gather  tovvarfi 
sunset  in  the  cafe  across  from  the  consulate  for  a  "cocktail  San  Mar- 
tin," one  of  whom  now  volunteered  to  see  me  as  far  as  Montevideo 
just  across  the  river — a  hundred  and  twenty  miles  away.  Out  the 
Paseo  de  Colon  the  Darsena  Sud  was  ablaze  with  the  lights  of  the 
several  competing  steamers,  equal  to  the  best  on  our  Great  Lakes, 
which  nightly  cross  the  mouth  of  the  Plata.  For  the  two  cities  are 
closely  related.  In  summer  Portcfios  flee  to  Montevideo's  beaches ;  in 
winter  the  white  lights  of  Buenos  Aires  attract  many  Uruguayans ;  the 
year  round  business  men  hurry  back  and  forth.  Aboard  the  Viena 
of  the  Mihanovich  Line  I  watched  the  South  American  metropolis 
shrink  to  a  thin  row  of  lights  strewn  unbrokenly  for  many  miles  along 
the  edge  of  the  horizon,  like  illuminated  needle-points  where  sea  and 
sky  had  been  sewed  together.  Wide  and  shallow,  exposed  here  to  all 
the  raging  winds  from  the  south,  the  Parana  Guazu  ("River  like  a 
Sea")  often  shows  itself  worthy  of  its  aboriginal  name  in  this  winter 
season.  I  did  not  wake,  however,  until  the  red  sun  was  rising  over 
Montevideo  and  her  Cerro  and  we  were  gliding  up  to  a  capacious 
wharf. 

It  was  fitting  that  my  sight-seeing  should  begin  with  the  little  rocky 
hill  surmounted  by  an  old  Spanish  fortress  which  is  the  first  and  last 
landmark  of  the  traveling  Uruguayan,  To  the  Cerro,  barely  five  hun- 
dred feet  high,  yet  standing  conspicuously  above  all  the  rest  of  the 
surrounding  world,  Montevideo  owes  both  its  name  and  its  situation. 
When  the  Portuguese  navigator  Magalhaes,  whom  we  call  Magellan, 
sailed  up  what  he  hoped  might  prove  a  passageway  from  the  Atlantic  to 
the  Pacific,  a  sailor  on  lookout,  catching  sight  of  this  little  eminence. 
cried  out,  "Monte  vid'  eu!    I  see  a  hill!''    On  it  was  built  the  first  fort 


112  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

against  the  Charrua  Indians,  and  its  value  both  as  a  place  of  refuge  and 
as  a  stone  quarry  made  it  natural  that  the  chief  town  of  the  region 
should  have  grown  up  about  it.  The  part  the  Cerro  has  since  played  in 
Uruguayan  history  is  out  of  all  keeping  with  its  insignificant  size;  the 
poems  that  have  been  written  about  it  are  as  legion  as  the  legends 
which  hover  over  it.  It  holds  chief  place  in  the  national  coat-of-arms 
and  in  the  hearts  of  homesick  sons  of  Uruguay.  Never  in  all  the 
rebellions  and  revolutions  since  its  discovery  has  the  Cerro  been  taken 
by  force  of  arms ;  never  will  the  people  of  Montevideo  tire  of  telling 
haughty  Portefios  that  Buenos  Aires  has  nothing  like  it. 

From  its  summit  all  Montevideo  may  be  seen  in  picturesque  detail 
and  far-spread  entirety,  the  point  where  the  Plata,  deep  brown  to  the 
last,  for  all  its  sea-hke  width,  meets  the  Atlantic  and  flows  away  with  it 
over  the  horizon,  then,  swinging  round  the  circle,  the  faintly  undulating 
plains,  broken  here  and  there  by  low  purplish  hillocks,  of  the  "Purple 
Land."  It  is  a  pity  that  the  Cerro,  certainly  not  impregnable  as  a  fortress, 
has  not  been  made  a  place  of  residence,  or,  better  still,  transformed  into 
such  a  park  as  Santa  Lucia  of  Santiago.  The  fashionable  section  of 
Montevideo,  however,  has  moved  in  the  other  direction,  leaving  the 
famous  hill,  with  its  garrison-sheltering  old  Spanish  fort  and  its  light- 
house, to  squatters'  shanties,  rubbish  heaps,  and  capering  goats,  not  to 
mention  the  insistent  odors  of  a  neighboring  saladcro  where  cattle  are 
reduced  to  salt  beef. 

In  many  ways  the  Uruguayan  capital  is  the  most  attractive  city  of 
South  America ;  as  a  place  to  live  in,  contrasted  wath  a  place  in  which 
to  make  a  living,  it  is  superior  to  many  American  cities.  There  is  a 
peculiar  quality  of  restfulness  about  it  unknown  to  its  large  and  ex- 
cited rival  across  the  Plata,  something  distinctive  which  easily  makes 
up  for  the  handicap  of  being  so  near  a  world  metropolis  as  to  be  over- 
shadowed by  it.  For  another  thing,  it  is  nearer  the  mouth  of  the  river, 
making  it  a  true  ocean  port  and  the  most  nearly  a  seaside  resort  of  any 
national  capital  in  Spanish-America.  Built  on  a  series  of  rocky  knolls, 
roughly  suggesting  the  fingers  of  a  rude  hand,  the  charm  of  its  location 
is  enhanced  by  undulations  that  recall  by  contrast  the  deadly  flatness 
of  Buenos  Aires.  The  old  town,  all  that  existed  two  generations  ago, 
is  crowded  compactly  together  in  true  Spanish  fashion  on  what  might 
be  called  the  forefinger,  though  it  had  unlimited  space  to  spread  land- 
ward. On  this  rocky  peninsula  the  cross  streets  are  narrow  and  fall 
into  the  sea  at  either  end,  for  here  it  is  but  eight  or  ten  short  blocks 
from  the  Plata  to  the  Atlantic.     On  one  side  is  an  improved  harbor 


HEALTHY  LITTLE  URUGUAY  113 

with  steamers  of  many  nationalities,  on  the  other  is  a  bay  lined  with 
splendid  beaches.  Like  that  of  its  great  neighbor,  the  harbor  of  Mon- 
tevideo requires  frequent  dredging,  and  its  problem  is  quite  the  con- 
trary of  that  in  Valparaiso  and  other  bottomless  west-coast  ports. 

Along  with  its  seascape,  this  situation  gives  the  city  a  very  ex- 
hilarating air,  especially  in  the  winter  season.  Then  it  is  often  pene- 
tratingly cold,  and  frequently  so  windy  that  not  only  the  most  se- 
curely fastened  hat  but  the  hair  beneath  it  threatens  to  abandon  the 
wearer.  On  the  day  of  my  landing  a  windstorm  caused  several  deaths 
and  much  property  damage.  Among  other  things  it  took  the  sheet- 
iron  roof  off  a  building  in  which  four  fishermen  had  taken  refuge 
and  as  these  ran  away  the  roof  followed  and  fell  upon  them.  In  the 
third  story  of  the  frame  hotel  that  housed  me  I  often  woke  from  a 
dream  of  being  rocked  in  a  ship  at  sea,  and  Punta  Brava  in  a  far 
corner  of  Montevideo's  suburbs  was  rightly  named  indeed  on  windy 
days.  Fierce  thunderstorms  also  marked  my  stay  in  the  capital,  some 
of  them  accompanied  by  the  mightiest  of  flashes  and  crashes,  during 
which  water  fell  in  such  torrents  that  one  could  scarcely  see  across 
a  narrow  street — tropical  storms  they  might  have  been  called,  had 
it  not  kept  right  on  raining  long  after  it  had  done  raging. 

L"^ruguay  claims  1,400,000  inhabitants,  of  whom  all  but  the  million 
are  said  to  live  in  the  capital,  though  the  lack  of  a  definite  census  makes 
guessing  a  popular  pastime.  But  the  city  is  much  larger  in  extent  than 
this  number  would  imply.  One  can  ride  for  hours  on  the  lines  of  its 
two  excellent  tramway  companies  without  once  leaving  town.  Even 
in  the  older  sections  Montevideo  is  substantially  and  handsomely  built, 
with  many  good  modern  monuments.  Only  a  few  old  landmarks  are 
left,  such  as  the  purely  Spanish  cathedral  on  the  Plaza  de  la  Constitu- 
cion,  for  Uruguay  seems  to  consider  her  first  demand  for  independence 
in  1808  the  beginning  of  her  history  and  makes  no  effort  to  preserve  the 
memories  of  her  colonial  or  pre-colombian  days.  For  all  that,  the 
capital  has  retained  a  considerable  atmosphere  of  old  Spain,  a  distinctly 
seventeenth-century  echo,  along  w-ith  her  South  American  style  ot 
up-to-dateness.  The  best  houses  along  the  fine  avenues  are  generally 
in  colonial  style,  an  almost  Aloorish  one-stor>'  building,  with  lofty 
ceilings  and  space-devouring  patios.  Especially  in  the  roomy  suburbs 
do  the  dwellings  stop  abruptly  at  one  story,  so  abruptly  sometimes  as 
to  suggest  that  ruin,  or  at  least  a  laborer's  strike,  has  suddenly  befallen 
the  owner.    The  real  reason  is  probably  because  it  would  be  hard  to 


114  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

marry  off  one's  daughters  if  their  "dragons"  had  to  begin  their  wooing 
by  shouting  up  to  the  second  or  third  floor  windows. 

Iron-work  grilles  are  universal,  and  many  house-doors  have  brass- 
lined  peepholes  through  which  the  resident  can  see  whether  the  man 
knocking  is  worth  admitting.  Gardens  with  subtropical  plants  are 
numerous  and  promenades  under  palm-trees  by  no  means  unusual. 
Especially  along  the  edge  of  the  sea  there  are  over-ornate  qiiintas,  al- 
ternating with  washerwoman  shanties ;  but  there  is  little  oppressive 
poverty  in  Montevideo,  and  at  the  same  time  little  of  the  conspicuous 
plutocracy  so  familiar  across  the  river,  a  lack  of  contrast  which  adds, 
perhaps,  to  the  monotony  of  many  a  street  vista.  Poor  ranchos  are 
by  no  means  rare  in  the  farther  outskirts,  but  these  are  open-air  and 
almost  clean  slums  compared  with  the  congested  sections  of  our  own 
large  cities.  Out  beyond  the  older  town  are  park  improvements  on  an 
extensive  scale.  The  Prado,  with  its  great  Rose  Gardens,  said  to  in- 
clude hundreds  of  varieties,  though  but  few  were  in  bloom  among  the 
dead  leaves  of  June,  is  worth  coming  far  to  see.  Here  real  hills  break 
the  monotony  of  the  landward  vista  and  make  artificial,  overpolished 
Palermo  with  its  deadly  flatness  seem  disagreeable  by  contrast.  The 
tale  goes  that  a  group  of  wealthy  Portenos  once  set  on  foot  a  move- 
ment to  buy  one  of  Uruguay's  hills,  carry  it  across  the  river,  and  set 
it  up  in  one  of  their  own  plazas.  No  doubt  they  could  have  reim- 
bursed themselves  by  charging  admission  and  rights  of  ascension,  but 
like  many  ambitious  Latin-American  plans  this  one  died  prematurely. 

In  general  Uruguayans  are  well-dressed,  and  comfortably  well- 
to-do,  if  one  may  judge  from  appearances;  compared  with  roto  Chile 
the  capital  is  immaculate.  "Beachcombers"  are  rare  in  this  only  im- 
portant port  of  the  country  and  beggars  are  seldom  seen,  though 
there  is  a  plague  of  petty  vendors.  It  had  been  like  landing  on  a  hos- 
tile shore  to  make  our  way  through  the  amazingly  impudent  m.ob  of 
hoarse-voiced  cabmen,  newsboys,  hotel  touts,  lottery-ticket  vendors, 
vagrants,  pickpockets,  useless  policemen,  and  idle  citizens  into  the  tran- 
quil waters  of  a  Sunday  morning  in  the  Uruguayan  capital ;  but  this 
common  waterfront  experience  did  not  last  long.  There  is  something 
extremely  pleasant  about  most  of  the  modest,  unpretentious  Fluvenses, 
as  the  people  of  Montevideo  call  themselves,  a  term  we  might  translate 
as  "rivereens."  They  have,  as  a  rule,  a  natural  politeness,  a  frank 
and  open  simplicity  all  but  unknown  across  the  river,  a  leisurely, 
contemplative  philosophy  that  will  not  be  broken  down  even  by  the 
material  prosperity  of  a  country  that  is  making  perhaps  the  most  in- 


HEALTHY  LITTLE  URUGUAY         I15 

telligent  use  of  its  situation  and  resources  of  all  the  republics  of  Latin- 
America.  It  is  said  that  the  Uruguayan  came  mainly  from  the  Basque 
provinces  and  the  Canary  Islands,  while  the  argentino  is  chiefly  of 
southern  Spanish  origin ;  that  the  former  brought  with  him  and  still  re- 
tains a  sturdier,  less  facile,  but  more  dependable,  more  thoroughgo- 
ing character.  Those  of  wide  commercial  experience  in  the  continent 
say  that  the  Uruguyan  is  the  most  honest  man  south  of  Panama ;  every 
foreign  resident  I  questioned  rated  L'ruguay  as  the  most  lovable 
country  in  South  America — and  as  a  rule  foreign  residents  do  not 
see  the  best  side  first.  Personally,  I  found  the  Uruguayan  more  sin- 
cere, less  selfish,  somew^hat  more  solid  and  at  the  same  time  more  of  an 
impulsive  idealist  than  his  materialistic  neighbors  across  the  Plata. 
His  country  is  far  enough  south  to  escape  the  indolence  of  the  tropics, 
far  enough  north  to  make  life  itself  seem  of  equal  importance  with 
making  a  living.  With  every  natural  advantage  of  the  Argentine,  ex- 
cept the  doubtful  one  of  size,  and  a  more  frugal  and  industrious  popu- 
lation not  greatly  modified  by  recent  immigration,  Uruguay  is  still 
peopled  by  a  kind  of  colonial  Spaniard,  somewhat  improved  by  the 
breezy,  generous  quality  of  his  New  World  domain. 

To  those  who  approach  it  from  the  south,  where  they  are  almost 
unknown,  negroes  are  noticeable  in  Montevideo  and  become  more  so 
as  one  proceeds  north^\-ard  through  the  country.  No  doubt  they  drift 
down  from  Brazil  and,  finding  the  wide  Plata  an  obstacle,  seldom 
reach  its  southern  shores.  Yet  they  are  so  few,  and  slavery  is  so 
slightly  connected  with  them  in  the  Uruguayan  mind,  that  there  is 
scarcely  a  "color-line."  The  daughter  of  a  former  Uruguayan  minis- 
ter to  Washington  told  me  she  had  always  informed  inquiring  Ameri- 
cans that  there  were  no  negroes  in  Uruguay,  and  had  only  discovered 
her  error  upon  her  return  with  a  sharpened  color  sense.  In  Uruguay 
people  are  often  called  by  nicknames  of  color,  ample  proof  that  there 
is  no  sensitiveness  about  the  hue  of  the  skin.  These  popular  terms, 
usually  preceded  by  the  affectionate  "Che"  of  southeastern  South 
America,  run  all  the  gamut  of  tints, — "Hola,  Che  morocha."  "Diga, 
Che  triguena !"  "Como  va,  Che  negrito  ?"  It  is  a  common  experience 
of  visiting  Anglo-Saxons  to  hear  themselves  addressed  by  familiar 
persons  as  "Che  rubio,"  literally  "red-head,"  as  a  complimentary  dis- 
tinction from  the  universally  black-haired  natives.  The  latter,  par- 
ticularly the  women,  are  almost  always  of  plump  form  and  comely 
face,  whatever  their  color,  with  few  of  the  cadaverous  types  so  nu- 
merous   in   the   north   temperate   zone.     Uruguayan    women,    by   the 


Ii6  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

way,  are  perhaps  a  trifle  more  Moorish  in  their  family  life  than  those 
of  Buenos  Aires,  but  they  are  not  wholly  unaware  of  the  "advanced" 
atmosphere  of  their  environment. 

Buenos  Aires  has  long  had  the  reputation  of  being  the  most  ex- 
pensive city  on  earth,  probably  because  it  is  large  enough  to  be  fa- 
mous, for  certainly  its  neighbor  Montevideo  is  still  less  of  a  poor 
man's  paradise.     For  one  thing,  the  difference  in  basic  coins  favors 
the  Uruguayan  profiteer.     Many  things  which  cost  an  Argentine  peso 
in  Buenos  Aires  cost  an  Uruguayan  peso,  or  two  and  a  half  times  as 
much,  in  Montevideo.     It  is  highly  to  the  credit  of  Uruguay,  and  a 
constant  source  of  pride  to  her  citizens,  that  her  dollar  is  the  only 
one  in  the  world  normally  worth  more  than  our  own;  but  it  is  painful 
for  the  visitor  to  be  forced  to  purchase  at  so  high  a  price  pesos  that 
will  seldom  buy  what  a  quarter  should.     In  hotel  charges,  public  con- 
veyances, laundries,  lottery-tickets,  and  other  necessities  of  life  the 
Uruguayan  dollar  seems  to  go  little  farther  than  that  of  the  Argentine, 
and  certainly  it  has  nothing  like  the  purchasing  power  of  our  own. 
Not  only  are  there  substantial  coins  in  circulation,  instead  of  more  or 
less  ragged  scraps  of  paper  redeemable  only  in  the  imagination,  or  coins 
so  debased  that  only  a  careless  speaker  would  refer  to  them  as  silver, 
but  any  gold  coin  is  legal  tender  in  Uruguay.     Throw  down  an  Eng- 
lish sovereign  in  the  smallest  shop  in  the  most  isolated  corner  of  the 
republic  and  it  is  instantly  accepted  at  a  fixed  value.     An  American 
$10  gold  piece  passed  without  argument  as  $9.66  Uruguayan,  though 
our  dollar  bill  was  rated  at  only  ninety  ccntcsimos  before  the  war.     I 
chanced  to  be  in  a  pulperia  far  out  in  the  interior  of  Uruguay  when 
the  shop-keeper  asked  the  large  estate  owner  of  the  vicinity  to  take  a 
hundred  pesos  to  the  capital   for  him.     By  and  by  the  pulpero  re- 
turned from  a  back  room  with  a  small  handful  of  gold  and  a  bit  of 
paper  on  which  he  had  figured  out  the  sum  he  wished  to  send.     He 
handed  the  estanciero  several  English  sovereigns,  some  German  20- 
mark  pieces,  a  Brazilian  gold  coin,  an  American  half -eagle,  two  French 
napoleons,  and  the  rest  of  the  sum  in  Uruguayan  paper,  silver,  and 
nickel.     There  was  no  argument  whatever  as  to  the  "exchange"  on 
the  foreign  coins ;  each  had  its  fixed  value  anywhere  in  Uruguay.     It 
was  something  like  what  a  universal  coinage  will  be  when  the  world 
grows  honest  and  intelligent  enough  to  establish  one— though  of  course 
our  bankers  would  not  allow  any  such  s}stem  to  become  universal, 
even  did  the  perversity  of  human  nature  make  it  possible.    This  ready 
exchange,  and  the  possibility  of  turning  Uruguayan  paper  into  gold 


HEALTHY  LITTLE  URUGUAY  117 

upon  demand,  are  among  the  reasons  which  make  the  Uruguayan  dol- 
lar normally  the  most  valuable  in  the  world. 

Down  on  one  of  its  beaches  the  city  of  Montevideo  runs  a  sumptu- 
ous hotel  and  an  official  Monte  Carlo.  Here  it  brings  ambassadors 
and  "distinguished  visitors"  for  afternoon  tea  or  formal  banquets, 
gives  balls,  keeps  an  immense  staff  of  liveried  menials  at  public  ex- 
pense the  year  round,  and  during  the  season  takes  money  away  from 
the  wealthy  "sports"'  from  across  the  river  with  an  efficiency  not  ex- 
ceeded anywhere  along  the  Riviera.  More  than  one  passing  observer 
has  found  this  an  excellent  means  of  taxing  the  rich  for  the  benefit  of 
the  poor,  since  the  profits  of  the  Casino  go  into  the  municipal  treas- 
ury. As  much  can  scarcely  be  said  for  the  lottery  run  by  the  federal 
government,  with  its  incessant  appeal  to  the  gambling  instincts  of  all 
classes  of  the  population.  The  tickets  assert  that  "the  lottery  is  run 
for  the  Hospital  de  Caridad  and  its  profits  are  destined  for  exclusively 
beneficent  ends,"  but  the  statement  rings  as  hollow  as  many  similar 
attempts  on  the  part  of  Latin-America  to  coax  itself  to  believe  that 
there  is  something  good  in  an  essentially  vicious  institution. 

Music  and  drama  flourish  during  the  winter  in  Montevideo ;  un- 
counted cinemas  perpetrate  their  piffle  in  and  out  of  season.  An  ex- 
cellent Italian  dramatic  company,  headed  by  the  emotional  actress 
Lyda  Borelli,  sometimes,  and  probably  not  unjustly,  called  the  suc- 
cessor of  Duse,  was  playing  at  the  "Solis"  during  my  visit — and  bring- 
ing out  in  pitiless  contrast  the  insufferable  barnstormers  usually  seen 
on  the  South  American  stage.  The  opera  season  is  in  August,  when 
that  half  of  stars  and  troupe  who  do  not  cross  to  Santiago  de  Chile 
are  on  their  way  back  from  Buenos  Aires  to  New  York  or  Europe.  Or- 
chestra seats  are  then  at  least  $12  each  and  boxes  from  $80  up,  but  as 
one  must  have  a  box  for  the  season  or  be  rated  a  social  nonentity,  there 
are  sad  rumors  of  riuvcnsc  families  scrimping  all  the  rest  of  the  year 
in  order  to  buy  their  opera  tickets.  Naturally  this  makes  them  some- 
what exacting  and  capable  of  giving  an  unpleasant  reception  to  sing- 
ers tired  out  at  the  end  of  a  long  season.  Caruso  himself  has  been 
roundly  hissed  in  Montevideo.  Plays  and  the  opera  begin  at  twenty- 
one  o'clock.  As  in  Italy  and  Brazil,  and  more  recently  in  the  Argen- 
tine, the  law  requires  the  use  of  the  excellent  twenty-four-hour  sys- 
tem in  all  public  buildings,  and  many  a  private  timepiece  has  followed 
suit.  The  decree  was  new  and  throughout  the  city  were  many  pasted- 
over  signs  such  as : 

Museum  open  from  12  to  ii6|  o'clock. 


ii8  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Somewhere  in  South  America  I  met  a  Dane  who  contended  that  a 
small  country,  like  a  man  of  modest  wealth,  is  better  off  than  a  great 
nation.  Uruguay  bears  out  the  statement.  We  have  been  accustomed 
to  speak  of  the  "A.B.C."  countries  of  South  America  as  having  the 
only  stable  and  progressive  governments  in  that  continent.  Only  its 
slight  size,  as  compared  with  its  gigantic  neighbors,  has  caused  Uru- 
guay to  be  overlooked  in  the  formation  of  that  list.  As  its  near  neigh- 
bor and  relative,  Paraguay,  is  perhaps  at  the  bottom  of  the  scale  gov- 
ernmentally,  so  Uruguay,  by  its  national  spirit,  its  energetic  charac- 
ter, and  its  advanced  legislation  is  probably  at  the  top,  more  nearly 
fulfilling  the  requirements  of  an  independent  state  than  any  other  na- 
tion south  of  the  United  States.  Certainly  it  is  superior  to  both  Chile 
and  Brazil  in  everything  but  size,  and  it  is  doubtful  whether  even 
the  Argentine  is  governed  with  more  intelligence  and  general  honesty. 
Once  as  troublesome  a  state  as  any  in  Latin-America,  Uruguay  has 
settled  down  and  developed  her  natural  resources  until  she  is  noted 
for  her  financial  stability,  and  revolutions  are  memories  of  earlier 
generations.  Were  she  a  large  country,  instead  of  being  merely  a 
choice  morsel  of  land  smaller  than  some  counties  of  Texas,  there  is 
little  doubt  that  she  would  stand  at  least  as  high  as  any  of  her  neigh- 
bors—or would  size,  always  an  obstacle  to  good  government  in  Latin- 
America,  bring  her  down  from  her  high  level  ? 

Uruguay  has  not  always  been  a  small  countr}^  nor  for  that  matter 
a  country  at  all.  In  the  olden  days  the  Banda  Oriental,  or  "Eastern 
Bank,"  of  the  River  Uruguay  was  a  province  of  the  viceroyalty  of 
Buenos  Aires.  To  this  day  the  official  name  of  the  country  is  "La 
Republica  Oriental  del  Uruguay,"  and  the  people  still  call  themselves 
"Orientals."  In  1800  the  whole  "Eastern  Bank"  had  but  40,000  in- 
habitants, of  whom  15,000  lived  in  Montevideo.  When  Napoleon 
overran  Spain  and  the  viceroyalty  of  Buenos  Aires  revolted,  the  Banda 
Oriental  remained  loyal,  thus  opening  the  first  breach  between  the  two 
sections  of  the  colony.  Not  long  afterward  the  "grito  de  libertad" 
sounded  in  the  interior  of  the  province,  and  the  man  who  was  destined 
to  become  the  national  hero  of  Uruguay,  the  "First  Oriental,"  the 
"Protector  of  the  Oriental  Provinces,"  soon  took  the  head  of  the 
revolt. 

Jose  Gervasio  Artigas  was  a  mere  estanciero  of  the  "Eastern  Bank" 
until  he  took  up  soldiering,  some  time  before  the  "cry  of  liberty."  In 
181 1  he  left  the  Spanish  army  and  fled  to  Buenos  Aires,  but  soon 
became  an  advocate  of  complete  Uruguayan  independence,  a  patriot 


HEALTHY  LITTLE  URUGUAY  119 

or  a  traitor,  according  to  the  side  of  the  Plata  on  which  the  speaker 
lives.  Having  won  their  freedom  from  Spain,  the  argentinos  were 
finally  defeated  by  the  "Oriental"  general,  Rivera,  and  Artigas  be- 
came ruler  not  only  of  the  present  Uruguay  but  of  the  now  Argentine 
provinces  of  Entre  Rios,  Corrientes,  Santa  Fe,  and  Cordoba,  these 
having  formed  the  "Federal  League"  in  opposition  to  the  Buenos  Aires 
Directory.  To  read  Uruguayan  school-books,  "the  Tucuman  congress 
was  secretly  working  to  establish  a  monarchy  on  the  Plata,  and  our 
five  provinces  sent  no  delegates."  One  by  one,  however,  the  other  pro- 
vinces returned  to  the  new  mother  country,  only  the  "Eastern  Bank" 
persisting  in  its  isolation  and  demand  for  complete  autonomy.  Mean- 
while Artigas  was  in  exile — and  at  one  time  was  offered  a  pension  by 
the  United  States — but  finally,  in  1825,  a  band  of  "Orientals"  be- 
sieged Montevideo  and  Uruguay  declared  her  full  independence. 

The  Uruguayan  flag  remains  the  same  as  that  of  the  Argentine,  with 
a  golden  sun  superimposed.  The  revolutions  of  1863  and  1870,  each 
two  years  long,  are  the  only  serious  disturbances  that  have  occurred 
in  the  "Repiiblica  Oriental"  since  its  independence,  and  with  those  ex- 
ceptions the  country  has  steadily  advanced  in  health  and  prosperity. 
Its  government  is  more  centralized  than  our  own,  more  like  that  of 
the  Argentine,  the  congress  being  elected  by  popular  vote  in  the  de- 
partments, but  the  executives  of  the  latter  being  appointed  by  the 
federal  government.  Argentinos  speak  of  Uruguay  with  a  kind  of 
forced  condescension,  as  of  a  member  of  the  family  temporarily 
estranged  from  the  rest,  or  as  a  land  of  no  great  importance  yet  one 
worthy  of  again  being  a  province  of  what  they  consider  the  greatest 
country  on  the  globe,  and  they  pretend  at  least  to  think  that  the  great 
development  of  the  Argentine  will  in  time  inevitably  bring  back  to 
the  fold  this  one  lost  Iamb.  But  the  "Orientals"  consider  their  gov- 
ernment superior  and  show  no  tendency  to  make  the  change. 

Uruguay's  reputation  as  perhaps  the  most  progressive  republic  in 
South  America  is  largely  based  on  her  advanced  legislation,  most  of 
it  fathered  by  a  recent  president.  Under  his  guidance  stern  minimum 
wage  and  maximum  hour  laws  have  been  enacted,  and  many  doctrines 
of  the  milder  radicals  have  been  put  into  modified  practice.  The  legis- 
lators forbade  bull-fights,  cock-fights,  and  prize-fights  in  one  breath. 
Uruguay  is  the  only  country  in  South  America  with  a  divorce  law,  and 
the  church  has  been  shorn  of  the  militant  power  it  still  has  in  most 
of  Spanish-America.  Montevideo  bids  fair  to  become  the  Reno  of  the 
continent,  as  well  as  its  only  summer-resort  capital.    Dissatisfied  bus- 


I20  WORKING  NORTH  FROIvI  PATAGONIA 

bands  or  wives  move  over  from  Buenos  Aires ;  Spanish  and  Italian 
actors  look  forward  to  their  Uruguayan  engagement  as  an  oppor- 
tunity to  air  their  conjugal  grievances — though  they  are  not  "aired" 
in  the  American  yellow-journal  sense,  for  here  divorce  is  strictly  an 
affair  between  the  parties  concerned  and  the  judge  and  lawyers,  rarely 
being  so  much  as  mentioned  even  in  the  back  pages  of  a  provincial 
newspaper.  Priests  are  comparatively  rare  sights  in  the  Banda  Orien- 
tal; religious  festivals  and  public  processions  have  been  abolished,  and 
the  influence  of  the  church  on  the  government  reduced  to  a  minimum. 
Montevideo  is  the  seat  of  an  archbishop,  but  he  exists  only  on  paper, 
for  the  party  in  power  is  not  friendly  to  the  clergy  and  the  papal  ap- 
pointment must  be  confirmed  by  congress.  There  are,  to  be  sure, 
many  crude  superstitions  left,  especially  among  the  poorer  classes  and 
in  the  rural  districts,  but  they  give  Rome  no  such  income  as  it  de- 
rives from  similar  sources  in  the  rest  of  \h^  continent.  Several  Protest- 
ant churches  have  been  built  in  Montevideo,  and  all  faiths  enjoy 
a  freedom  that  would  seem  astounding  on  the  West  Coast.  Indeed,  com- 
parative indifference  to  sect  lines  makes  it  an  ordinary  experience  for 
Protestant  ministers  traveling  in  rural  districts  to  be  asked  by  persons 
professing  themselves  devout  Catholics  to  baptize  their  children.  "For 
one  thing,"  as  one  such  rustic  put  it,  "it  is  cheaper  than  when  the 
priest  does  it."  It  may  seem  a  matter  of  slight  importance  to  those 
who  have  never  known  the  suffering  inflicted  by  the  infernal  din  of 
hand-beaten  clappers  against  disguised  kettles  in  the  church  towers  of 
the  Andes  that  on  the  evening  of  my  first  day  in  Uruguay  real  church 
bells,  of  a  musical  tone  I  had  almost  forgotten,  were  ringing  in  a  way 
that  must  have  been  genuine  music  to  the  ocean-battered  old  windjam- 
mer just  creeping  into  the  harbor.  Far  off  in  the  autumn  twilight  the 
sound  was  still  carried  softly  to  my  ears  by  the  wind  before  which  gray 
clouds  were  scurrying  like  a  battalion  in  broken  ranks  of  defeat,  to- 
ward the  western  sky,  stained  blood-red  by  the  already  dead  sun. 

Politically  the  Uruguayans  are  hlancos  or  colorados,  "whites"  or 
"reds."  It  is  a  splendid  distinction.  For  one  thing,  the  parties  can 
print  their  arguments  and  their  lists  of  candidates  in  posters  of  their 
own  color  and  even  the  stranger  has  no  difficulty  in  deciding  which 
side  is  speaking.  Townsmen  can  announce  their  political  affiliation  by 
wearing  a  red  or  a  white  cravat,  or  a  bit  of  ribbon  in  their  lapels ; 
countrymen,  by  the  color  of  their  neckerchiefs.  There  is  contrast 
enough  between  the  two  colors  to  obscure  the  lack  of  any  other  real 
difference  between  the  two  parties.     In  theory  the  "reds"  are  "ad- 


HEALTHY  LITTLE  URUGUAY  121 

vanced"  and  the  "whites"  more  conservative.  Evidently  there  are  no 
neutrals  in  Uruguayan  politics ;  everyone  is  either  "red"  or  "white" 
from  the  cradle,  not  because  Uruguayans  take  a  greater  interest  in 
political  matters  than  average  republican  societies,  but  because  it  is 
bad  form,  and  lonesome,  to  be  outside  the  ranks;  and  men  who  do  not 
vote  are  fined.  How  an  Uruguayan  becomes  attached  to  this  or  that 
party  is  a  mystery;  almost  none  of  them  can  give  any  real  reason  for 
their  affiliation.  Evidently,  like  "Topsy,'  they  are  "jes'  born"  in  their 
natural  colors. 

It  is  now  fifteen  years  since  the  "reds"  came  to  power  on  the  heels 
of  Uruguay's  last  revolution.  Possession  is  nine  points,  even  in  so 
progressive  a  corner  of  Latin-America,  and  the  "whites"  have  been 
the  "outs"  from  that  day  to  this.  Yet  one  often  hears  blancos  speak 
of  "when  we  start  our  new  revolution,"  for  it  seems  to  be  taken  for 
granted  that  the  "whites"  will  come  back  some  day  with  bullets,  and 
virtually  every  man  in  the  country  is  prepared  to  fight  on  short  no- 
tice for  one  side  or  the  other.  Roughly  speaking,  "big  business," 
large  estate  owners,  and  the  church,  in  other  words  the  predatory 
classes,  are  "whites,"  though  neckcloths  of  that  color  are  by  no  means 
rare  on  the  peons  and  gauchos  of  the  more  backward  country  dis- 
tricts. The  leader  of  the  "reds,"  now  a  private  citizen  merely  because 
the  constitution  does  not  permit  the  same  man  to  be  president  twice 
in  succession,  has  often  been  described  as  "a  mixture  of  idealist  and 
predatory  politician,"  but  he  knows  the  secret  of  imposing  his  will 
upon  the  government  and  is  generally  credited  with  most  of  Uruguay's 
progressive  legislation.  For  all  his  efforts  and  many  real  results, 
however,  there  is  still  much  that  is  rotten  in  the  Republic  of  Uruguay. 
The  most  advanced  laws  are  of  doubtful  use  when  they  are  adminis- 
tered by  the  bandits  in  office  who  still  flourish  throughout  the  rural 
districts.  In  contrast  with  the  brave  modern  theories  of  government 
is  the  practice  in  such  things  as  permitting  scores  of  the  lowest  forms 
of  brothels  to  flourish  in  the  very  heart  of  the  capital.  I  cannot  re- 
call a  more  disgusting  public  sight  in  the  western  hemisphere  than  the 
long  rows  of  female  wrecks  in  scant  attire  who  solicit  at  the  doors 
of  several  streets  radiating  from  the  Anglican  church,  while  veritable 
mobs  of  men  and  youths  march  back  and  forth  to  "look  'em  over," 
amid  laughter,  ribald  witticisms,  and  worse. 

Contrary  to  the  usual  custom  in  South  America,  there  is  no  mili- 
tary conscription  in  Uruguay ;  recruits  are  enticed  by  posters  covered 
with   glowing  promises.     Yet   for   all  the   "advanced"   principles   of 


122  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

equality  reputed  to  reign  in  the  little  republic,  its  army  is  largely  made 
up  of  the  poorer  and  more  ignorant  element  of  the  population.  It 
is  not  a  dangerous  military  force,  but  it  is  very  useful  to  the  party 
in  power  not  only  in  preserving  law  and  order  but  for  discouraging 
"white"  revolutions.  Whether  or  not  only  "reds"  are  recruited,  or 
whether  those  placed  on  the  government  payroll  automatically  be- 
come "reds,"  whether  indeed  youths  in  the  political-ridden  interior 
do  not  have  redness  thrust  upon  them,  is  a  question  not  to  be  deter- 
mined during  a  brief  visit.  As  to  the  "national  navy"  of  Uruguay,  it 
consists,  if  my  semi-official  informant  is  trustworthy,  of  one  gunboat, 
two  cruisers,  four  steamers,  and  a  transport,  all  of  which,  when  they 
are  not  absent  on  one  of  the  frequent  "official  missions"  that  make 
life  in  the  Uruguayan  navy  just  one  festival  after  another,  may  be 
seen  anchored  in  the  harbor  of  Montevideo,  their  eyes  turned  rather 
toward  the  "whites"  on  shore  than  toward  foreign  foes. 

I  traveled  fifteen  hundred  miles  on  the  network  of  the  Ferrocarril 
Central  of  Uruguay.  This  and  the  equally  British  "Midland"  reach 
all  towns  of  importance  in  the  republic,  though  they  still  by  no  means 
cover  it  thoroughly.  Railway  travel  in  South  America  is  seldom  as 
luxurious  as  in  the  United  States,  but  in  the  dwarf  republic  both 
cars  and  service  are,  on  the  whole,  excellent ;  the  trains  are  so  much 
more  comfortable  than  many  of  the  towns  through  which  they  run 
that  it  is  not  strange  that  scores  of  the  inhabitants  come  down  to  sit 
in  them  as  long  as  they  remain.  There  are  few  accidents,  the  trains 
are  seldom  late,  though  not  particularly  swift,  and  while  fares  are  high 
there  are  frequent  low-priced  excursions,  announced  on  handbills  as 
in  our  own  land.  The  English-made  cars  are  on  a  modified  American 
plan,  some  of  the  first-class  coaches  having  leather-upholstered  divans 
as  large  as  beds,  even  second-class  boasting  little  tables  between  the 
seats  for  those  who  care  to  lunch  or  play  cards.  Between  the  two 
classes  at  opposite  ends  of  the  train  there  is  usually  a  compartment 
with  kitchen  stove  and  pantry  that  serves  as  a  combination  cafe  and 
dining-car,  a  generous  dinner  costing  a  peso,  wine,  or  "cork  rights" 
from  those  who  bring  their  liquor  with  them,  extra.  Sleeping-cars, 
journeving  on  both  lines  in  order  to  find  distance  enough  for  an  all- 
night  trip,  run  from  Montevideo  to  Paysandu  and  Salto,  on  the  shores 
of  the  River  Uruguay  bounding  on  the  west  the  republic  of  the  "East- 
ern Bank."  Compared  with  Chile,  railroading  in  Uruguay  is  palatial 
and  immaculate,  though  even  here  the  only  heating  arrangements  for 
bitter  June  days  are  doormats  between  the  seats,  and  the  only  really 


C    v_ 


HEALTHY  LITTLE  URUGUAY  123 

serious  criticism  to  be  made  is  a.c;ainst  the  bad  habit,  common  throii,c[h- 
oiit  South  America,  of  starting  the  trains  at  some  unearthly  hour  in 
the  morning. 

I  took  the  shortest  Hne  first  and,  rambUng  at  moderate  speed  across 
a  somewhat  rolHng  country  more  fertile  in  appearance  than  the  Ar- 
gentine, brought  up  at  Minas.  A  broad  stone  highway,  here  and 
there  disintegrated  by  the  heavy  rains,  led  the  mile  or  more  from 
the  station  to  the  tow^n,  an  overgrown  village  in  a  lap  of  low  rocky 
hills  monotonously  like  any  other  Uruguayan  or  Argentine  town  of 
its  size.  Avith  a  two-tov.ered  church  and  a  few  rows  of  one-story 
buildings  toeing  wide,  bottomless  streets.  As  in  the  Argentine,  there 
are  no  cities  in  Uruguay  that  compare  with  the  capital ;  the  present 
department  capitals  were  originally  forts  against  the  Indians  and  the 
Portuguese  around  vrhich  people  gathered  for  protection,  and  few 
of  them  have  cause  to  grow  to  importance. 

The  second  journey  carried  me  into  the  northwestern  corner  of 
the  country.  As  far  as  Las  Piedras,  a  suburban  town  twenty  miles 
from  the  capital,  there  are  a  score  of  daily  trains  in  either  direction. 
Street-cars  com.e  here  also,  the  place  being  noted  for  a  granite  monu- 
ment topped  by  a  golden  winged  Victory  commemorating  a  battle  for 
independence  in  181 1,  from  the  terrace  of  which  Montevideo's  fortress- 
crowned  Cerro  still  stands  conspicuously  above  all  the  rest  of  the  visi- 
ble world.  Then  this  chief  "Oriental"  landmark  disappears  and  to 
the  comparative  cosmopolitanism  of  the  federal  district  succeeds  the 
bucolic  calm  of  the  canipana,  as  the  pampa  is  called  in  Uruguay.  The 
absence  of  trees  alone  gives  this  a  mournful  aspect.  The  ''Oriental" 
has  tried  half-heartedly  to  make  up  for  the  natural  lack  of  woods  by 
planting  imported  eucalyptus  and  poplar,  at  least  about  his  country 
dwellings,  but  nowhere  do  these  reach  the  dignity  of  a  forest.  Uru- 
guay has  less  excuse  for  poor  roads  than  the  Argentine,  for  if  it  has  as 
much  rain  and  even  heavier  soil,  it  has  an  abundance  of  stone,  rare 
in  the  land  across  the  Plata.  Yet  though  several  stone  highways 
leave  the  capital  Avith  the  best  of  intentions,  they  soon  degenerate  into 
sloughs  seldom  navigable  in  the  wet  wiliter  season.  Most  Uruguayan 
roads  are  merely  strips  of  open  campana,  the  legal  twenty-two  meters 
wide,  flanked  by  wire  fences,  or  occasionally  by  cactus  hedges.  Es- 
tates a  few  miles  off  the  railroads  have  no  ch.ance  of  getting  produce 
to  m.arket  during  a  large  portion  of  the  year;  yet  the  prosperity  of 
the  country  depends  almost  entirely  on  the  exporting  of  food-stuffs. 

Fertile  rolling  lovias,  with  now  and  then  a  solitary  omhil  spreading 


124  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

its  arms  to  the  wind  on  the  summit,  made  up  most  of  the  landscape, 
a  scene  not  greatly  different  from,  yet  infinitely  more  pleasing  than, 
the  dead  flatness  of  Argentine  pampas.  The  ombii  is  the  national  tree 
of  Uruguay,  of  majestic  size  and  always  standing  in  striking  isolation 
on  the  crest  of  a  loma,  because,  according  to  the  poet,  it  loves  to  over- 
look and  laugh  at  the  silly  world,  though  the  botanist  explains  that  it  is 
planted  by  birds  dropping  single  seeds  in  their  flight  and  reaches  ma- 
turity only  on  hillocks  out  of  reach  of  stagnant  water.  Beyond  Mai 
Abrigo,  rightly  named  "Bad  Shelter,"  granite  rocks  thrust  themselves 
here  and  there  through  the  soil ;  for  long  stretches  coarse  brown 
cspartUlo  grass  covered  the  country  like  a  blanket.  This  and  the 
abundant  thistles  often  ruin  the  black  loam  underneath,  but  the  aver- 
age "Oriental"  cstanclcro  abhors  agriculture,  preferring  to  give  his 
rather  indolent  attention  to  cattle  and  sheep,  for  he  considers  plant- 
ing fit  only  for  Indians,  peons,  and  immigrant  chacreros.  Nor  is  the 
lot  of  these  Basque,  Spanish,  or  Italian  small  farmers  always  happy, 
even  though  they  hold  their  plots  of  earth  on  fairly  generous  terms, 
for  locusts  have  been  known  to  destroy  a  year's  labor  in  a  few  hours. 
There  were  a  few  riding  gang-plows,  however,  drawn  by  eight  or 
ten  oxen,  and  many  primitive  wooden  plows  behind  a  pair  or  two  of 
them.  Sleek  cattle,  and  horses  of  better  stock  than  the  average  in 
South  America,  grazed  along  the  hollows  and  hillsides;  now  and  then 
an  ostrich  of  the  pampas,  occasionally  a  whole  flock  of  them,  legged 
it  away  across  the  rolling  campana.  Though  most  of  the  country 
people  lived  in  thatched  huts  made  of  the  rich  loam  soil,  sometimes 
laid  together  with  a  clapboard  effect  and  oozing  streaks  of  mud  at  this 
season,  both  sexes  were  well  and  cleanly  dressed. 

The  railroad  wound  around  every  loma,  refusing  to  take  more  than 
the  slightest  grades.  Now  and  then  we  climbed  ever  so  little  up  the 
flanks  of  such  a  knoll  and  discovered  to  vast  depths  of  haze-blue 
horizon  a  plump,  rolling  country  of  purplish  hue,  dotted  with  dark 
little  clumps  of  eucalyptus,  from  each  of  which  peered  a  low  farm- 
house and  occasionally  a  Cervantes  windmill  for  the  grinding  of  grain. 
There  were  many  such  estancia  houses,  yet  they  were  all  far  apart 
in  the  immensity  of  the  little  Republic  of  the  Eastern  Bank.  Why 
most  stations  were  so  far  from  the  towns  they  served,  in  this  level 
country,  was  a  mystery.  The  towns  themselves  varied  but  slightly  in 
appearance, — a  scattered  collection  of  one-story  buildings,  in  most 
cases  covered  with  a  stucco  that  had  at  some  time  been  painted  or 
whitewashed,  a  pulperia,  or  general  store,  sacred  chiefly  to  the  dis- 


HEALTHY  LITTLE  URUGUAY  125 

pensing  of  strong  drink,  and,  radiating  from  it,  wide  roads  plowed  into 
knee-deep  sloughs  of  black  earth.  A  few  sulkies  and  huge  two-wheeled 
carts,  an  occasional  country  wagon  with  four  immense  wheels,  from 
which  produce  was  leisurely  being  loaded  into  freight-cars  set  aside 
by  the  local  switch  engine — to  wit,  a  yoke  of  oxen — some  real  estate 
and  auction  signs  offering  the  chance  of  a  life-time,  completed  the 
background  of  the  picture.  In  the  foreground  the  inevitable  gang 
of  shouting,  mud-bespattered  hackmen  was  almost  lost  in  the  throng 
of  wind-and-sun-browncd  men  in  bloomerlike  trousers.  Peons  smoked 
their  eternal  cigarettes ;  gauchos  shod  in  low  alpargatas  or  high,  soft, 
wrinkled  leather  boots,  a  white  or  a  red  kerchief  floating  about  their 
necks,  the  short,  stocky  riding  whip  known  as  a  rcbenque  hanging 
from  a  wrist,  lounged  about  the  door  of  the  pulperia,  to  posts  before 
which  were  tied  trail-spattered  horses  saddled  with  several  layers  of 
sheepskins.  An  incredibly  motley  collection  of  dogs ;  a  majestic  po- 
liceman in  full  uniform  and  helmet  above  his  voluminous  homhachas, 
looking  essentially  peaceful  for  all  the  sword  dangling  at  his  side ; 
a  few  men  and  youths,  bare-legged  to  the  knee,  wading  about  with 
cheerful  faces,  as  if  the  rainy  season  were  at  worst  a  temporary  in- 
convenience more  than  offset  by  the  long  months  of  fine  weather,  added 
their  picturesque  bit  to  the  gathering.  Every  movement  and  gesture 
showed  these  people  to  be  of  quicker  intelligence  than  the  dwellers  in 
the  high  Andes.  Few  women  were  seen  either  on  trains  or  at  stations, 
except  at  the  smaller  towns,  where  there  were  sometimes  groups  of 
them,  wholly  white  with  few  exceptions,  but  wearing  earrings  worth}- 
the  daughters  of  African  chieftains.  At  each  halt  the  station-master  in 
his  best  clothes,  looking  busier  and  more  important  than  a  prime  min- 
ister on  coronation  day,  stood  watch  in  hand,  the  bell-rope  in  the  other, 
waiting  for  the  time-table  to  catch  up  with  us ;  the  town  notables  looked 
on,  half-anxiously,  half-benignly,  as  if  they  considered  themselves  very 
indulgent  in  allowing  the  train  to  run  through  their  bailiwick  and 
felt  deeply  the  responsibility  involved ;  boys  of  assorted  sizes,  bare- 
foot and  shod,  wormed  their  way  in  and  out  of  the  throng  staring  at 
ever\-thing  with  wondering  eyes;  a  few  comely  girls  sauntered  about 
to  see  and  be  seen,  and  friends  and  relatives  took  the  hundredth 
last  embrace  amid  much  chatter  and  mutual  thumping  of  backs. 
Then  all  at  once  the  stationmaster  gives  the  bell  three  sharp  taps,  as 
much  as  to  say,  ''I  mean  it,  and  I  am  not  a  man  to  be  trifled  with," 
and  as  the  train  gets  slov/ly  under  way  some  town  hero  grasps  the 
opportunity  to  show  his  fearlessness  by  catching  it  on  the  fly,  and 


126  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

dropping  off  again  half  a  car-length  beyond  with  a  triumphant,  sheep- 
ish grin  on  his  sun-browned  countenance. 

Two  days  later  the  sun,  rising  huge  and  red  over  my  left  shoulder, 
painted  a  brilliant  pink  the  rounded  loiiias  flanking  the  Y-shaped  line 
to  Treinta  y  Tres  (also  written  "33")  and  to  Melo,  far  to  the  north- 
east of  iMontevideo,  then  spread  a  pale  crimson  tint  over  all  the 
gently  rolling  world.  Fluffy  lambs  turned  tail  and  fled  as  we  ap- 
proached, the  watchdog,  true  to  his  calling  even  unto  death,  charging 
the  train  against  all  odds  and  putting  it  to  ignominious  flight.  Here 
and  there  lay  a  whitening  skeleton,  the  animal's  skull  sometimes  stuck 
up  conspicuously  on  the  top  of  a  fence-post.  There  is  no  unsettled 
despohlado  in  Uruguay,  no  deserts  or  haunts  of  wild  Indians,  but  there 
is  still  much  land  put  to  little  or  no  use  and  not  a  few  remains  of 
the  destruction  wrought  during  the  civil  war  that  ended  in  1852. 
Rare,  indeed,  is  the  standing  structure  in  the  rural  districts  that  was 
not  built  since  that  time. 

At  a  small  station  we  were  joined  by  a  youth  of  twenty,  pure  Cau- 
casian of  race,  of  the  class  corresponding  to  our  "hired  man."  His 
long,  wavy,  jet-black,  carefully  oiled  hair  contrasted  strangely  with 
his  complexion,  very  white  under  the  tan ;  his  eyes  were  light-brown, 
as  was  also  the  labial  eyebrow  he  now  and  then  affectionately  stroked. 
He  wore  a  raven  black  suit,  the  coat  short  and  tight-fitting,  the  trous- 
ers, or  homhachas,  huge  as  grainsacks,  disappearing  in  great  folds 
into  calfskin  half -boots.  A  black  felt  hat  of  the  squared  shape  once 
popular  at  our  colleges  was  held  in  place  by  a  narrow  black  ribbon 
tied  coquettishly  under  his  chin.  The  bit  of  his  speckless  shirt  that 
could  be  seen  was  light  green ;  above  it  was  a  rubber  collar  and  a 
cream-colored  cravat  adorned  with  a  "gold"  scarfpin ;  on  the  third 
finger  of  his  left  hand  he  wore  a  plain  gold  band ;  about  his  neck  floated 
a  huge,  snow-white,  near-silk  kerchief,  and  a  foreign  gold  coin  hung 
from  the  long  gilded  watch-chain  looped  ostentatiously  all  the  way 
across  his  chest.  About  his  waist  he  wore  a  leather  belt  six  inches 
wide,  with  several  buttoned  pockets  or  compartments  in  which  he 
kept  money,  tickets,  tobacco,  and  other  small  possessions,  and  from 
the  back  of  which,  barely  out  of  sight,  hung  his  revolver.  A  poncho  of 
faint  pink-white,  as  specklessly  clean  as  all  the  rest  of  his  garments, 
and  thrown  with  studied  abandon  over  one  shoulder,  completed  his 
outfit. 

He  rode  first-class,  and  having  produced  his  ticket  with  a  million- 
aire gesture  meant  to  overawe  the  modest  guarda  whose  duty  it  was  to 


HEALTHY  LITTLE  URUGUAY  127 

gather  it,  he  strode  into  the  dining-car  with  great  ostentation  and 
called  for  a  drink.  With  the  same  air  of  unbounded  wealth  he  paid 
his  reckoning,  flung  a  generous  tip  to  the  waiter,  who  probably  got 
more  in  sl  week  than  this  at  best  low-salaried  farm-hand  in  a  month, 
and  strutted  back  to  his  seat.  It  was  evident  that  he  w-as  not  travel- 
ing far,  or  he  would  have  sneaked  into  the  second-class  coach  in  his 
old  clothe?.  At  each  station  he  got  off  to  parade  haughtily  up  and 
down  the  platform,  casting  peacock  glances  at  the  dark-tinted  criolla 
girls  who  embroidered  it.  I  approached  him  at  one  such  stop  and 
asked  permission  to  take  his  picture.  He  refused  in  very  decided  and 
starded  terms.  I  felt  that  his  "no"  was  not  final,  however,  and 
scarcely  a  mile  more  lay  behind  us  before  he  came  wandering  up  with 
a  companion  and  sat  down  beside  me.  \\'hy  did  I  want  his  picture? 
\\'ould  it  cost  anything?  How  many  copies  of  it  would  I  give  him? 
Well,  if  it  was  true,  as  I  claimed,  that  they  could  not  be  finished  on  the 
spot — and  why  not? — I  could  of  course  send  them  to  him?  Gradu- 
ally he  reached  the  opposite  extreme  of  begging  me  to  take  his  picture. 
His  companion  having  suggested  that  it  might  be  published  "alia  en 
Eiiropa''  he  kept  his  delight  down  to  becoming  gaucho  dignity  with 
difficulty,  and  before  we  descended  to  take  the  picture  at  the  station 
where  he  left  the  train,  after  a  short  and  evidently  his  only  railway 
journey  in  months,  he  was  assuring  me  that  I  might  publish  it  "over 
there  in  Europe,  in  'Fray  Alocho'  of  Buenos  Aires"  (which  the 
raucous-voiced  trainboy  incessantly  oft'ered  for  sale)  "or  anywhere 
else."  Only  when  the  train  had  gone  on  without  him  did  I  discover 
that  he  was  a  bianco  fleeing  from  arrest  in  his  own  department  for  the 
killing  of  a  rural  official  in  some  political  squabble,  a  fact  that  seemed 
to  be  common  knowledge  among  my  fellow-passengers  and  which 
must  have  made  a  bit  startling  my  sudden  request  to  photograph  him. 
The  Cerro  lighthouse  was  still  flashing  through  the  dense  black 
night  when,  late  in  June,  on  the  shortest  day  of  the  year,  I  took  the 
tri-weekly  train  for  Brazil.  By  the  time  the  edge  of  darkness  was 
tinted  pink  by  a  cloudless  day  which  gradually  spread  upward  from 
the  horizon,  we  were  already  halting  at  country  stations  where  thickly 
wrapped  rustics  w^ho  had  dri^  en  miles  in  their  bulky  two-wheeled 
carts,  a  lantern  set  on  either  side  of  them  in  a  sort  of  wooden  niche 
raised  aloft  on  a  stick,  were  unloading  battered  cans  of  milk.  Du- 
razno,  a  good-sized  department  capital  strewn  over  a  low  knoll  and 
terminating  in  a  church,  was  so  flooded  by  the  River  Yi  at  its  feet 
that  its  parks,  alameda,  and  "futbol"  field  were  completely  under  vva- 


128  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

ter  and  many  poor  ranchos  stood  immersed  to  their  ears.  The  name? 
of  the  stations  were  often  suggestive, — Carda,  Sarandi,  IMolles,  all 
named  for  indigenous  trees,  so  striking  is  one  of  them  in  this  almost 
treeless  landscape.  From  Rio  Negro,  another  of  the  department  capi- 
tals which  pass  in  close  succession  on  this  line,  the  "Midland"  railway 
paralleled  our  own  for  a  dozen  miles  before  striking  off  over  the 
brown  lomas  toward  Paysandii.  Wei!  on  in  the  afternoon  the  smoothly 
rolling  country  broke  up  into  the  little  rocky  gorge  of  a  small  stream 
lined  with  bushy  trees.  It  was  probably  not  five  hundred  feet  any- 
where from  the  bottom  of  the  brook  to  the  top  of  the  rock-faced 
hill,  but  this  was  such  unusual  scenery  to  "Orientals"  that  I  had  been 
hearing  since  hours  before  of  the  extraordinary  beauty  of  this  natural 
phenomenon,  and  all  prepared  to  drink  their  fill  of  it  from  the  windows 
of  the  train.  It  was  named  Valle  Eden,  but  times  seem  to  have  changed 
in  that  ideal  spot,  for  a  policeman  in  mammoth  honihachas  stood  on 
the  station  platform,  and  of  Eve  there  was  not  so  much  as  a  fig-leaf 
to  be  seen. 

I  had  ridden  the  sun  clear  around  his  short  winter  half-circle  when 
I  descended  at  Tacuarembo.  The  town  had  a  hint  of  tropical  ways, — 
women  going  languidly  down  to  the  little  sandy  river  with  bundles  of 
clothing  on  their  heads,  the  streets  running  out  into  grassy  lanes 
scattered  with  carelessly  built  ranchos.  Features,  which  had  grown 
more  and  more  Indian  all  day  along  the  way  and  in  the  second-class 
coaches,  here  sometimes  suggested  more  aboriginal  than  Caucasian 
blood.  Here,  too,  there  had  been  much  rain,  and  the  very  bricks  had 
sprouted  green  on  the  humid,  unsunned  south  ends  of  the  houses.  The 
shortness  of  the  days  was  emphasized  by  the  discovery  that  I  was 
back  in  candle-land  again,  where  there  was  nothing  to  do  in  the  eve- 
ing  but  stroll  the  streets  or  go  to  bed. 

I  had  been  reading  the  Uruguayan  epic  "Tabare"  for  hours  next 
morning,  and  possessing  my  soul  in  such  patience  as  one  acquires  in 
Latin-America,  when  I  learned  by  chance  that  a  mucamo,  as  they  call 
a  mozo  in  Uruguay,  had  been  waiting  in  the  hotel  patio  below  and  ask- 
ing for  me  every  few  minutes  since  the  night  before,  the  servants 
having  been  too  indolent  to  bring  me  word.  With  the  better  part  of 
a  day  lost  I  rode  away  on  a  stout,  gray-white  horse  of  rocking-chair 
canter.  The  muddy  or  flooded  road  curved  and  turned  and  rose  and 
fell,  always  seeking  the  moderate  height  of  the  succeeding  ridges  and 
here  and  there  crossing  gently  rounded  cuchillas.  The  mucamo  on  his 
piebald  was  outwardly  a  most  unprepossessing  creature,  but  he  was 


HEALTHY  LITTLE  URUGUAY  129 

a  helpful,  cheery  fellow,  in  p^reat  contrast  to  the  usual  surly  work- 
man of  southern  South  America,  and  tlioufjjli  only  sixteen  and  scarcely 
able  to  read,  he  was  by  no  means  dull-witted.  Apparently  there  was 
.lot  a  bird,  a  flower,  or  an  animal  which  he  did  not  know  intimately, 
and  he  was  supernaturally  quick  in  catchin;^  sight  or  sound  of  them. 
The  hornero,  a  little  brown  bird  that  makes  its  ovenlike  nest  on  fence- 
posts,  the  branches  of  trees,  and  the  cross-pieces  of  telegraph-poles,  was 
there  in  force :  the  cotorra,  a  species  of  noisy  paroqueet,  was  almost  as 
numerous.  The  chingolo,  resembling  a  sparrow,  sits  on  the  backs  of 
grazing  cattle  and  lives  on  the  garrapatas,  or  ticks,  that  burrow  into  the 
animal's  hide.  The  hicn-tc-veo  ("I  spy  you"),  a  yellow  bird  with 
a  whistling  call  suggesting  that  of  a  happy  child  playing  hide-and- 
seek,  frequently  glided  past;  the  startled  cry  of  the  tcru-teru  rose  as 
we  advanced,  disturbing  it.  The  latter  is  called  the  "sentinel  bird" 
and  is  so  certain  to  give  warning  of  anything  approaching  that  even 
soldiers  have  found  it  a  useful  ally.  Dark-gray  with  white  wings 
and  a  slight  crest,  it  resembles  a  lapwing  with  a  cry  not  unlike  that 
of  our  "killdeer."  The  bicn-te-veo  and  the  teni-teru  live  in  perfect 
immunity  because  of  a  local  superstition  similar  to  the  one  sailors  have 
for  the  albatross.  The  woodpecker  of  Uruguay  is  called  carpintcro, 
because  he  works  in  wood;  the  viuda  (widow),  a  little  white  bird 
with  a  black  head,  is  so  called,  my  companion  explained  to  me  in  all 
innocence,  because  she  produces  her  brood  regularly  each  year  with- 
out ever  being  seen  with  a  male.  A  little  dark -brown  bird  called  the 
barranquero  builds  nests  like  the  homes  of  our  ancient  cliff-dwellers,  in 
the  sides  of  barrancas,  or  sand-banks.  Among  the  many  small  birds, 
songsters,  screamers,  and  disciples  of  silence,  which  eddied  about  us, 
one  of  the  most  conspicuous  was  the  cardenal,  gray  with  white  under 
the  wings,  its  whole  head  covered  with  a  bright-red  liberty  cap.  A 
large  bird  resembling  the  stork  my  companion  called  "Juan  Grande"; 
others  call  it  the  chaja,  because  of  the  jeering  half-laugh  it  is  always 
uttering.  It  lives  on  the  edges  of  swamps,  though  it  cannot  swim. 
A  big  brown  carancJw,  a  hawk-like  bird  living  on  carrion,  circled  above 
us  with  the  ordinary  South  American  scavenger  buzzard,  here  called 
simply  ciicrz'O,  or  crow.  There  is  good  shooting  of  a  local  partridge 
in  Uruguay,  the  open  season  being  from  April  to  September.  At 
plowing  time  the  gulls  come  in  great  numbers  to  feast  on  the  fat  grubs. 
The  dainty  crested  Uruguayan  sparrow  has  all  but  been  driven  out 
by  the  English  variety,  introduced,  if  the  local  legend  can  be  believed. 


I30  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

by  an  immigrant  who  let  a  cageful  of  them  fly  rather  than  pay  duty 
en  them. 

Thus  we  rode  hour  after  hour  over  the  rolHng  lomas  and  cuchillas. 
The  ground  was  here  and  there  speckled  with  macachines,  daisy-like 
little  flowers  of  a  wild  plant  that  produces  a  species  of  tiny  svv-eet  po- 
tato. The  mucamo  had  never  heard  of  the  Castilian  tongue ;  what  he 
spoke  was  the  "lingua  oriental."  It  was,  to  be  sure,  by  no  means 
pure  Spanish,  but  a  Spaniard  would  have  had  no  difficulty  in  under- 
standing him. 

At  the  door  of  an  estancia  house  with  all  the  comforts  reasonably 
to  be  expected  in  so  isolated  a  location  I  was  met  by  "Piririn,"  son 
of  a  former  minister  to  London  and  Washington,  and  brother  of  a 
well-known  Uruguayan  w^riter.  His  English  w^as  as  fluent  as  my  own, 
with  just  a  trace  of  something  to  show  that  it  was  not  his  native  tongue. 
An  old  woman  at  once  brought  us  mate,  and  we  sucked  alternately  at 
the  protruding  tube  each  time  she  refilled  the  gourd  with  hot  water. 
The  sun  soon  set  across  the  rich  loam  country,  which  was  here  and 
there  being  turned  up  by  plodding  oxen,  and  threw  into  relief  the 
three  cerros  chatos,  flat-topped  hills  that  give  the  region  its  nickname 
and  which  suggest  that  the  level  of  the  country  was  once  much  higher 
before  it  was  washed  away  into  the  sea  by  heavy  rains  that  even  now 
gave  earth  and  sky  such  striking  colors. 

The  w^ealth  and  prosperity  of  the  native  estanciero  of  Uruguay  is 
rarely  indicated  by  the  size  or  dignity  of  his  estancia  house.  As  in 
the  Argentine  and  Chile,  many  estates  are  owned  by  men  living  in 
the  capital,  if  not  in  Europe,  each  in  charge  of  a  gerente,  or  overseer- 
manager.  Small  as  Uruguay  is — by  South  American  standards  it 
seems  tiny,  even  though  it  is  almost  as  large  as  New  England — many 
of  its  estancias  are  immense,  especially  in  these  northern  departments. 
There  has  been  much  chatter  by  politicians  about  limiting  the  size 
of  estates  and  setting  up  immigrants  in  the  place  of  absentee  owners, 
but  so  far  it  has  chiefly  ended  in  political  chatter  The  average  Uru- 
guayan estancia  house  is  not  particularly  well  adapted  to  the  climate, 
at  least  during  the  winter  months.  A  little  clump  of  poplars  or  eucalyp- 
tus, occasionally  a  solitary  omhii,  invariably  marks  the  site  of  the 
main  dwelling.  Not  a  few  men  of  com^parative  wealth  pig  it  out  on 
their  own  immense  estates,  scorning  modern  improvements,  cut  off 
by  impassable  roads  from  markets  and  all  the  outside  world  several 
months  a  year,  refusing  to  subscribe  to  the  rural  telephone,  depending 
for  their  news  on  private  postmen  hired  by  groups  of  their  fellows. 


HEALTPIY  LITTLE  URUGUAY  131 

A  few  estate  owners,  especially  those  who  have  lived  abroad,  demand 
moderate  comfort,  whether  for  themselves  or  their  managers,  though 
even  "Piririn"  was  content  with  more  primitive  conditions  than  many 
a  small  American   farmer  would  endure. 

It  is  quickly  evident  and  freely  admitted  that  the  average  estancia 
in  Uruguay  is  loose  of  morals.  Estancieros  frankly  state  that  it  is  bet- 
ter if  tlie  cook  is  old  and  unattractive.  It  seems  to  be  the  rule  rather 
than  the  exception,  for  estancia  washerwomen  and  others  of  their 
class  to  present  the  estate  with  a  score  of  children  by  members  of  tlie 
owning  faniily  and  perhaps  by  several  of  the  peons  as  well.  Among 
this  class  marriage  is  unpopular  and  generally  considered  superfluous. 
There  is  much  noise  about  L^ruguay's  "advanced"  theories  of  social 
improvement,  yet  the  law  forces,  and  costunibre  expects,  no  help 
from  the  father  in  the  support  of  his  illegitimate  children.  If  he 
chooses  to  acknowledge  them  and  aid  in  their  up-bringing,  he  is  cred- 
ited with  an  unusually  charitable  disposition.  The  woman,  on  her 
side,  takes  her  condition  as  a  matter  of  course.  She  will  admit  with 
perfect  equanimity  that  she  is  not  certain  just  who  is  father  of  this 
child  or  that  and  pointing  out  one  of  a  half  dozen  playing  about  the 
estancia  backyard  she  will  say  laughingly,  yet  with  a  hint  of  seriousness 
and  pride,  "Ah,  si,  el  tiene  papa ;"  that  is,  he  is  one  of  her  children 
whose  father  has  recognized  him.  Yet  these  women  are  as  punctilious 
in  general  courtesy  and  the  outward  forms  of  behavior  as  their  proud 
patron  or  the  hidalgo-mannered  peons. 

Next  day  "Piririn"  and  I  rode  away  in  the  Sunday  morning  sun- 
shine across  the  immense  estate,  the  teru-terus  screaming  a  warning 
ahead  of  us  wherever  we  w'ent.  In  and  about  a  baiiado,  a  swamp  full 
of  razor-edged  wild  grass  that  cut  the  fingers  at  the  slightest  touch, 
we  saw  specimens  of  the  three  principal  indigenous  animals  of  Uru- 
guay,— the  carpincho,  nutria,  and  muJita.  The  first,  large  as  an  Irish 
terrier,  is  grayish-brown  in  color,  with  an  unattractive  face  sloping 
back  from  nose  to  ears,  squirrel-like  teeth,  and  legs  suggestive  of  the 
kangaroo.  Amphibious  and  sometimes  called  the  river  hog,  he  looks 
like  a  cross  between  a  pig  and  a  rabbit,  or  as  if  he  had  wished  to  be 
a  deer  but  had  found  the  undertaking  so  difficult  that  he  had  given  it 
up  and  taken  to  the  water  and  to  rooting  instead.  On  the  edges  of 
Uruguayan  streams  there  are  many  happy  little  families  of  the  beaver- 
like nutria,  an  aquatic  animal  large  as  a  cat,  wnth  long  thick  fur  and 
a  rat-like  tail.  Playful  as  a  young  rabbit,  the  nutria  is  quick  of  hear- 
ing and  swift  of  action,  taking  to  the  water  at  once  when  disturbed 


132  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

and  leaving  only  its  nostrils  above  the  surface ;  yet  when  cornered  it  is 
savage,  as  many  a  dog  has  learned  to  his  sorrow.  When  the  pulperos, 
or  country  shopkeepers,  of  Uurguay  found  that  nutria  skins  brought 
a  high  price  from  the  furriers  of  Europe  and  the  United  States  they 
set  the  countrymen  to  killing  them  off  regardless  of  age,  sex,  or  sea- 
son, ruining  many  of  the  skins  by  their  clumsy  handling  and  all  but 
exterminating  the  species.  The  nmlita,  also  called  tatii,  is  a  timid, 
helpless  little  animal  of  the  iguana  family,  half-lizard,  half-turtle,  with 
a  scaly,  shield-like  covering  that  suggests  medieval  armor,  and  which, 
dug  out  of  its  hole  and  roasted  over  a  fagot-fire,  furnishes  a  repast  fit 
for  kings. 

The  flora  was  also  striking,  for  aU  the  absence  of  forests  and  large 
growths.  The  sina-sina  is  a  small  tree  with  dozens  of  trunks  grow- 
ing from  the  same  root,  willow-like  leaves,  and  large  thorns  that 
clutch  and  tear  at  anything  that  ventures  within  reach  of  it.  A  wa- 
terside bush  called  the  curupi  contains  a  poison  that  the  Charrua  In- 
dians formerly  used  for  tipping  their  arrows.  The  sarandi,  a  bush 
growin?  on  the  banks  of  streams  with  its  feet  always  in  the  water; 
the  madreselva,  or  honeysuckle;  the  chilca,  a  thinly  scattered  bush 
scarcely  two  feet  high,  and  the  guayacdn,  a  bushy  plant  with  beautiful 
white  flowers  in  season,  were  the  most  common  landscape  decorations. 
Thousands  of  macachines  covered  the  ground,  white  flowers  with  now 
and  then  a  touch  of  yellow  or  velvety  dark-red. 

The  gauchos  of  the  estate  had  been  ordered  to  rodear,  to  round  up 
a  large  herd  of  cattle,  and  soon  we  came  upon  them  riding  round  and 
round  several  hundred  on  the  crest  of  a  hillock.  On  the  backs  of  some 
of  the  animals  chingolos  still  sat  serenely  picking  away  at  the  qarrapa- 
ias  or  the  flesh  left  bare  by  them.  The  latter  are  the  chief  pest  of  an 
otherwise  almost  perfect  ranching  country,  for  thousands  of  these 
aggressive  ticks  burrow  into  the  hide  of  the  animals  and  suck  their 
blood  so  incessantly  that  great  numbers  of  cattle  die  of  anemia  or  fever. 
All  but  the  more  backward  estates  now  have  a  big  trough-like  bath 
through  which  the  cattle  are  driven  several  times  a  year  as  a  protection 
against  garrapatas,  but  even  so  it  is  one  peon's  sole  duty  to  ride  over 
the  estate  each  day  to  curear,  or  skin  the  animals  that  have  died,  carry 
the  skin  home,  and  stake  it  out  in  the  sun  to  dry. 

More  than  two  hours  of  riding  brought  us  to  the  almacen  or  pulperia, 
the  general  store  that  is  to  be  found  on  or  near  every  large  cstancia 
in  Uruguay.  As  the  day  was  Sunday  scores  of  gauchos  with  that  half- 
bashful,  laconic,  yet  self-reliant  air  common  to  their  class,  ranging  all 


HEALTHY  LITTLE  URUGUAY  133 

the  way  from  half-Indian  to  pure  white  in  race,  with  here  and  there 
the  African  features  bequeathed  by  some  Brazihan  who  had  wandered 
over  the  nearby  border,  silently  rode  up  on  their  shaggy  ponies  one 
after  another  out  of  the  treeless  immensity  and,  throwing  the  reins  of 
the  animal  over  a  fence-post  beside  many  others  drowsing  in  the  sun, 
stalked  noiselessly  into  the  dense  shade  of  the  acacia  and  eucalyptus 
trees  about  the  pulperia,  then  into  the  store  itself.  Most  of  them  were 
in  full  regalia  of  rccado,  pelloncs,  shapeless  felt  hat,  shaggy  whiskers 
and  poncho.  With  few  exceptions  the  "Oriental"  gaucho  still  clings  to 
bombachas  or  chiripd,  the  ballooning  folds  of  which  disappear  in  moc- 
casin-like alpargatas,  or  into  the  wrinkled  calf-skin  boots  still  called 
botas  dc  potro,  though  the  custom  that  gave  them  their  name  has  long 
since  become  too  expensive  to  be  continued.  These  "colt  boots"  were 
formerly  obtained  by  killing  a  colt,  unless  one  could  be  found  already 
dead,  removing  the  skin  from  two  legs  without  cutting  it  open,  thrust- 
ing the  gaucho  foot  into  it,  and  letting  it  shape  itself  to  its  new  wearer. 
A  short  leather  whip  hanging  from  his  leather-brown  wrist,  a  poncho 
with  a  long  fringe,  imme'nse  spurs  so  cruel  that  the  ready  wit  of  the 
pampa  has  dubbed  them  "nazarinas,"  a  gay  waistcoat,  and  last  of  all 
a  flowing  neckcloth,  the  last  word  of  dandyism  in  "camp"  life,  complete 
his  personal  wardrobe.  It  is  against  the  law  to  carry  arms  in  Uruguay, 
yet  every  gaucho  or  peon  has  his  ciichillo  in  his  belt,  or  carries  a 
revolver  if  he  considers  himself  above  the  knife  stage.  Every  horse- 
man, too,  must  have  his  rccado,  that  complication  of  gear  so  astonish- 
ing to  the  foreigner,  so  efficient  in  use,  with  which  the  rural  South 
American  loads  down  his  mount.  An  ox-hide  covers  the  horse  from 
withers  to  crupper,  to  keep  his  sweat  from  the  rider's  gear;  a  saddle 
similar  to  that  used  on  pack  animals,  high-peaked  fore  and  aft,  is  set 
astride  this,  and  both  hide  and  saddle  are  cinched  to  the  horse  by  a 
strong  girth  fastened  by  thongs  passed  through  a  ringbolt.  On  the 
bridle,  saddle,  and  whip  is  brightly  shining  silver,  over  the  saddle- 
quilts  and  blankets  are  piled  one  above  the  other,  the  top  cover  being 
a  saddlecloth  of  decorated  black  sheepskin  or  a  hairy  pcUon  of  soft, 
cool,  tough  leather,  and  outside  all  this  is  passed  a  very  broad  girth  of 
fine  tough  webbing  to  hold  it  in  place.  With  his  rccado  and  poncho 
the  experienced  gaucho  has  bedding,  coverings,  sun-awning,  shelter 
from  the  heaviest  rain,  and  all  the  protection  needed  to  keep  him  safe 
and  sound  on  his  pampa  wanderings. 

As  they  entered  the  pidpcria  the  newcomers  greeted  every  fellow- 
gaucho,  though  some  two  score  were  already  gathered,  with  that  limp 


134  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

handshake  pecuHar  to  the  rural  districts  of  South  America,  rarely 
speaking  more  than  two  or  three  words,  and  these  so  low  as  to  be 
barely  audible,  apparently  because  of  the  presence  of  "Piririn"  and 
myself.  The  rules  of  caste  were  amazing  in  a  country  supposed  to  be 
far  advanced  in  democracy.  Though  the  gaucho,  in  common  with  most 
of  the  human  family,  considers  himself  the  equal,  if  not  the  superior, 
of  any  man  on  earth,  he  retains  many  of  the  manners  of  colonial  days. 
"Piririn"  and  I,  as  lords  of  the  visible  universe  and  representatives  of 
the  wealth  and  knowledge  of  the  great  outside  world,  had  entered  the 
pulperia  by  the  family  door  and  were  given  the  choicest  seats — on  the 
best  American  oil-boxes  available — behind  the  counter.  The  sophisti- 
cated-rustic pidpero  greeted  us  each  with  a  handshake,  somewhat  weak, 
to  be  sure,  because  that  is  the  only  way  his  class  ever  shakes  hands, 
but  raising  his  hat  each  time,  while  we  did  not  so  much  as  touch  ours. 
To  have  done  so  would  have  been  to  lower  both  the  pulpcro's  and  the 
by-standing  gauchos'  opinion  of  us.  Then  he  turned  and  greeted  his 
gaucho  customers  with  an  air  nicely  balanced  between  the  friendly  and 
the  superior,  offering  each  of  them  a  finger  end,  they  raising  their  hats 
and  he  not  so  much  as  touching  his. 

Yet  these  slender,  wiry  countrymen,  carrying  themselves  like  self- 
reliant  freemen,  with  a  natural  ease  df  bearing  and  a  courtesy  in  which 
simplicity  and  punctilio  are  nicely  blended,  take  the  stranger  entirely 
on  his  merits  and  give  and  expect  the  same  courtesy  as  the  wealthy 
estanciero.  If  the  newcomer  shows  a  friendly  spirit,  his  title  soon 
advances  from  "Seiior" — or  "Mister,"  in  honor  of  his  foreign  origin, 
be  he  French,  Spanish,  Italian,  English,  or  American — to  the  use  of 
his  first  name,  and  he  will  be  known  as  "Don  Carlos,"  "Don  Enrique," 
or  whatever  it  may  be,  to  the  end  of  his  stay.  Later,  if  he  is  well  liked, 
he  may  even  be  addressed  as  "Che,"  that  curious  term  of  familiarity 
and  affection  universally  used  among  friends  in  Uruguay.  It  is  not  a 
Spanish  w^ord,  but  seems  to  have  been  borrowed  from  the  Guarani 
tongue,  in  which  it  means  "mine,"  and  probably  by  extension  "my 
friend."  To  be  called  "Che"  by  the  Uruguayan  gaucho  is  proof  of 
being  accepted  as  a  full  and  friendly  equal. 

In  theory  the  pulpero  establishes  himself  out  on  the  campana  only  to 
sell  tobacco,  mate,  strong  drink,  and  tinned  goods  from  abroad ;  in 
practice  these  country  storekeepers  have  other  and  far  more  important 
sources  of  income.  They  are  usurers,  speculators  in  land  and  stock, 
above  all  exploiters  of  the  gaucho's  gambling  instinct.  Thanks  per- 
haps to  the  greater  or  less  amount  of  Spanish  blood  in  his  veins  he  will 


hi:althy  little  Uruguay  13s 

accept  a  wager  on  anything,  be  it  only  on  the  weather,  on  a  cliild's  toys, 
on  which  way  a  cow  will  run,  on  how  far  away  a  bird  will  alight,  or 
on  whether  sol  6  numcro  ("sun  or  number,"  corresponding  to  our 
"heads  or  tails'')  will  fall  uppermost  at  the  flipping  of  a  coin.  This 
makes  him  easy  prey  to  the  puJpcro,  who  is  usually  a  Spaniard,  Basque, 
Italian,  or  "Turk,"  and  an  unconscionable  rogue  without  any  other 
ideal  than  the  amassing  of  a  fortune,  yet  who  somehow  grows  rich  at 
the  expense  of  the  peons  and  gauchos,  instead  of  meeting  the  violent 
death  from  the  quick-tempered  hi  jo  del  pais  who  despises  yet  fears 
him. 

The  gauchos  were  originally  called  "gauderios,"  that  is,  lazy,  good- 
for-nothing  rascals.  To-day  that  word  is  an  exaggeration,  for  they 
have  a  certain  merit  of  industry  and  simple  honesty.  There  is  con- 
siderable vendetta  among  them,  gambling  rows  and  love  affairs  espe- 
cially, much  of  which  goes  unpunished,  particularly  if  the  perpetrator 
is  a  "red"  and  his  victim  a  "white."  Punishment  for  fence-cutting  or 
sheep-stealing  is  surer ;  as  in  our  own  West  in  earlier  days  the  loss  of  a 
man  is  largely  his  own  affair,  while  the  loss  of  a  flock  of  sheep  or  a 
drove  of  cattle  is  serious.  To  make  matters  worse,  the  country 
coniisarios,  or  policemen,  are  often  subsidized  by  certain  esfancicros 
to  the  disadvantage  of  others,  and  the  jnes  de  paz  is  quite  likely  to  be 
a  rogue,  in  either  of  which  cases  the  friends  of  "justice"  usually  get  off 
and  their  enemies  get  punished. 

According  to  "Piririn,"  the  average  gaucho  is  an  incorrigible  wan- 
derer. Paid  but  ten  or  fifteen  pesos  a  month  "and  found,"  and  satis- 
fied with  quarters  which  most  workmen  in  civilized  lands  would  refuse 
with  scorn,  he  is  given  to  capricious  changes  of  abode  and  is  likely 
to  throw  a  leg  over  his  faithful  horse  at  the  least  provocation.  Among 
these  incurable  pampa  wanderers  there  are  not  a  few  "poor  whites," 
often  with  considerable  Anglo-Saxon  blood  in  their  veins,  its  origin 
lost  in  their  Spanicized  names.  Hospitality  is  the  first  of  the  virtues 
of  the  estancicro,  and  any  genial  horseback  tramp  who  turns  up  may 
remain  on  the  cstancia  unmolested  for  a  day,  a  week,  or  a  month,  as 
the  spirit  moves  him.  There  was  a  suggestion  of  our  own  cowboys 
among  the  group  that  finally  overflowed  the  pulpcria,  though  the 
gauchos  were  less  given  to  noisy  horseplay  and  had  far  more  dignity 
and  courtesy.  Some  of  them  could  read  without  having  to  spell  out  the 
words,  and  while  "Orientals"  in  the  mass  are  not  a  nation  of  readers 
and  there  is  considerable  illiteracv,  these  countrymen  were  much  more 


136  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

in  touch  with  the  world's  affairs  than  the  same  class  in  the  countries  of 
the  West  Coast. 

The  gaucho  may  still  occasionally  be  heard  thrumming  a  guitar  and 
wailing  his  sad,  Moorish,  genuinely  Oriental  songs,  invariably  senti- 
mental and  deeply  melancholy,  with  never  a  comic  touch,  like  a  lineal 
descendant  of  the  wandering  troubadour  of  the  Middle  Ages  or  the 
street-singers  of  the  Mohammedan  East.  When  he  is  not  making 
music  or  love,  he  is  sucking  mate  and  talking  horses.  He  has  more 
than  a  score  of  words  for  his  equine  companion,  running  through 
every  gamut  of  color,  behavior,  and  pace.  His  obsession  for  this 
topic  of  conversation  is  natural,  for  he  has  an  instinctive  horror  of 
going  on  foot  and  the  horse  is  to  the  resident  of  the  pampas  what  the 
ship  is  to  the  sailor ;  without  it  he  is  hopelessly  stranded.  Yet  his 
interest  is  entirely  of  a  utilitarian  nature.  He  is  racially  incapable  of 
any  such  affection  for  his  mount  as  causes  other  races  to  spare  it 
unnecessary  suffering;  if  he  coddles  it  at  all  it  is  merely  for  the  selfish 
motive  of  his  own  safety  or  convenience.  Among  the  picturesque 
types  of  the  campaha  and  the  pampa  is  the  domador,  the  professional 
horse-breaker.  His  customary  fee  is  five  pesos  a  head,  "with  living," 
and  his  methods  are  true  to  his  Spanish  blood.  Instead  of  being 
broken  early,  the  colts  are  allowed  to  run  wild  until  they  are  four  or 
five  years  old;  then  a  drove  of  them  is  rounded  up  in  a  corral  and  the 
victims  suddenly  lassooed  one  by  one  and  thrown  to  the  ground.  With 
half  a  dozen  peons  pulling  on  the  rope  about  his  neck  until  he  is  all 
but  strangled,  his  legs  are  tied  and  a  halter  is  put  on  and  attached  to  a 
tree,  where  the  animal  is  left  to  strain  until  he  is  exhausted,  often  hurt- 
ing himself  more  or  less  permanently.  Then  his  tongue  and  lower  jaw 
are  fastened  in  a  painful  noose  that  forces  him  to  follow  the  peon,  who 
rides  away,  jerking  at  the  rope.  Finally,  when  the  weary  and  fright- 
ened animal  is  trembling  in  every  limb,  the  brave  domador  mounts 
him  and,  with  a  horseman  on  either  side  to  protect  him,  and  pulling 
savagely  at  the  colt's  sore  mouth,  the  potro  is  galloped  until  he  is  com- 
pletely worn  out.  It  used  to  be  beneath  gaucho  dignity  to  ride  a  mare, 
and  to  this  day  no  self-respecting  domador  of  the  old  school  will  con- 
sent to  tame  one.  Sometimes  the  female  of  the  species  draws  carts, 
with  her  colt  running  alongside,  but  on  the  larger  cstancias  she  is 
allowed  to  roam  at  large  all  her  days. 

In  the  evening,  with  the  gauchos  departed  and  the  pulperta  officially 
closed  to  the  public,  we  added  our  bonfire  to  the  sixteen  others  in  honor 
■of  St.  Peter  and  St.  PauU  which  we  could  count  around  the  horizon, 


HEALTHY  LITTLE  URUGUAY  137 

and  gathered  about  the  table  with  the  pulpcro's  family  to  play  "lot- 
tery," a  two-cent  gambling  card  game.  It  was  long  after  midnight 
when  "Piririn"  shook  off  the  combined  fascination  of  this  and  the 
pulpcro's  amenable  daughter.  From  ni}-  cot  behind  the  pulpcria  coun- 
ter 1  saw  the  day  dawn  rosy  red,  but  clouds  and  a  south  wind  promised 
rain  before  my  companion  roused  himself.  We  got  into  an  arana 
(spider),  a  two- wheeled  cart  which  did  somewhat  resemble  that  w'eb- 
weaving  insect,  and  rocked  and  bumped  away  across  the  untracked 
campaha  behind  two  half-wild  young  horses.-  Never  was  there  a  let-up 
from  howling  at  and  lashing  the  reeking  animals  all  the  rest  of  the 
morning,  an  English  education  not  having  cured  "Piririn"  of  the 
thoughtless  cruelty  bequeathed  by  his  Spanish  blood.  Through  gullies 
in  which  we  w^ere  showered  with  mud,  up  and  down  hill  at  top  speed 
we  raced,  until  the  trembling  horses  were  so  weary  that  we  were  forced 
to  hitch  on  in  front  of  them  the  one  the  miicamo  was  riding,  in 
Tacuarembo  this  owner,  or  at  least  prospective  owner,  of  thousands  of 
acres  and  cattle  went  to  the  cheapest  hotel  and  slept  on  an  ancient  and 
broken  cot  in  the  same  room  with  two  rough  and  dirty  plowmen,  while 
I  caught  the  evening  train  for  the  Brazilian  border. 


CHAPTER  VII 

BUMPING    UP   TO    RIO 

UP  ON  the  thirty-first  parallel  of  south  latitude,  three  hundred  and 
sixty  miles  north  of  Montevideo,  there  is  a  town  of  divided 
allegiance,  situated  in  both  the  smallest  and  the  largest  coun- 
tries of  South  America.  When  the  traveler  descends  from  the  "Uru- 
guay Central"  he  finds  it  is  named  for  Colonel  Rivera,  the  Custer  of 
Uruguay,  who  made  the  last  stand  against  the  Cliarrua  Indians  and 
Avas  killed  by  them  in  1832.  But  as  he  goes  strolling  along  the  main 
street,  gazing  idly  into  the  shop  windows,  he  notes  all  at  once  that  the 
signs  in  them  have  changed  in  words  and  prices,  that  even  the  street 
has  an  entirely  different  name,  for  instead  of  the  Calle  Principal  it 
has  become  the  Rua  Sete  de  Setembro,  and  suddenly  he  awakens  to 
the  fact  that  instead  of  taking  a  stroll  in  the  town  of  Rivera,  in  the 
Republica  Oriental  del  Uruguay,  as  he  fancied,  he  has  wandered  into 
Santa  Anna  do  Livramento  in  the  state  of  Rio  Grande  do  Sul  in  the 
United  States  of  Brazil. 

There  is  no  getting  away  from  the  saints  even  when  the  tongue  and 
nationality  and  even  the  color  of  the  population  changes,  for  the  Portu- 
guese adventurers  who  settled  the  mighty  paunch  of  South  America 
were  quite  as  eager  for  celestial  blessings  on  their  more  or  less  nefari- 
ous enterprises  as  were  their  fellow  scamps  and  contemporaries,  the 
Spanish  conquistadores.  But  the  stray  traveler  in  question  is  sure  to 
find  that  another  atmosphere  has  suddenly  grown  up  about  him.  Bar- 
racks swarming  with  muscular  black  soldiers,  wearing  long  cloaks,  in 
spite  of  the  semi-tropical  weather,  as  nearly  wrong  side  out  as  possible, 
in  order  to  display  the  brilliant  red  with  which  they  are  lined,  give  a 
belligerent  aspect  to  this  warmer  and  mightier  land.  Negroes  and 
picanninies  and  the  unpainted  makeshift  shacks  that  commonly  go  with 
them  are  scattered  over  all  the  landscape;  oxen  with  the  yokes  on 
their  necks  rather  than  in  front  of  their  horns  testify  to  the  change 
from  Spanish  custom ;  instead  of  the  pretty  little  plaza  with  its  well- 
kept  promenades,  its  comfortable  benches,  and  its  well-tended  flower 
plots  that  forms  the  center  of  Rivera  or  any  other  Spanish-American 

138 


BUMPING  UP  TO  RIO  139 

town  that  has  the  slightest  personal  pride,  there  is  a  prai;a,  muddy, 
untendtd,  scatless,  and  unadorned.  The  sun,  too.  has  begun  to  bite 
again  in  a  way  unfamiliar  in  the  countries  in  southern  and  temperate 
South  America. 

Rivera  and  Santa  Anna  do  Livramento  are  physically  a  single  town. 
The  international  boundary  runs  through  the  center  of  a  football 
field  in  which  boys  in  Brazil  pursue  a  ball  set  in  motion  in  Uruguay, 
and  climbs  up  over  a  knoll  on  the  top  of  which  sits  a  stone  boundary 
post,  the  two  countries  rolling  away  together  over  plumj)  hills  densely 
green  in  color,  except  where  the  enamel  of  nature  has  been  chipped  off 
to  disclose  a  reddish  sandy  soil.  Surely  Brazil,  stretching  for  thirt}'- 
seven  degrees  of  latitude  from  Uruguay  to  the  Guianas,  a  distance  as 
far  as  from  Key  West  to  the  top  of  Labrador,  with  a  width  of  nearly  as 
many  degrees  of  longitude  from  Pernambuco  to  the  Andes  and  cover- 
ing more  space  than  the  continental  United  States,  is  large  enough  so 
that  its  inhabitants  need  not  have  crowded  their  huts  to  the  very  edge 
of  the  boundary  line  in  this  fashion,  as  if  they  were  fleeing  from  op- 
pressive rulers,  or  were  determined  that  little  Uruguay  shall  not  thrust 
her  authority  an  inch  farther  north. 

I  went  over  into  Brazil  early  in  the  day,  it  being  barely  three  blocks 
from  my  "Gran  Hotel  Nuevo,"  which  was  neither  grand,  new,  nor, 
strictly  speaking,  a  hotel.  But  when  the  sockless  manager-owner  of 
the  main  hostelry  of  Sant'  Anna  asked  me  two  thousand  something  or 
other  for  the  privilege  of  lying  on  a  hilly  cot  not  unlike  a  dog's  nest  in  a 
musty  hole  already  occupied  by  several  other  guests,  I  concluded  to 
remain  in  Uruguay  as  long  as  possible.  In  Montevideo  a  cablegram 
had  advised  me  to  make  myself  known  to  the  Brazilian  railway  officials 
at  the  frontier  and  learn  something  to  my  advantage.  I  could  not 
shake  ofif  a  vague  uneasiness  at  entering  with  slight  funds  a  country  of 
which  I  had  heard  many  a  disagreeable  tale  and  where  I  expected  to 
undergo  the  unpleasant  experience  of  not  understanding  the  language. 
Yet  when  at  length  I  found  the  station-master  of  the  "Compagnie 
Auxiliaire,"  in  a  red  cap  but,  I  was  relieved  to  note,  a  white  skin,  v/e 
talked  for  some  time  of  the  general  pass  with  sleeping-car  accommo- 
dations which  the  discerning  general  manager  of  the  railways  of 
southern  Brazil  seemed  bent  on  thrusting  upon  me,  before  I  realized 
that  he  was  speaking  Portuguese  and  I  Spanish,  and  understanding 
each  other  perfectly. 

It  is  2058  miles  by  rail  from  Montevideo  to  Rio  de  Janeiro,  and  the 
cost  of  this  overland  trip  to  the  average  traveler  with  a  trunk  or  two 


I40  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

and  a  moderate  appetite  would  be  about  $150.  One  may  leave  the 
Uruguayan  capital  on  Monday,  for  instance,  by  one  of  the  three  weekly 
trains,  and  arrive  in  the  Brazilian  capital  on  the  following  Saturday, 
spending  only  one  night  motionless  on  the  way — if  one  is  contented  to 
be  a  mere  tourist  rather  than  a  traveler  and  is  not  overburdened  with 
baggage.  For  this  must  be  carried  the  mile  or  more  over  the  frontier, 
at  which  it  is  examined  by  a  band  of  stupid  and  discourteous  negroes, 
who  seem  to  delight  in  putting  as  many  obstacles  as  possible  in  the  way 
of  the  well-to-do  traveler.  Not  being  included  in  that  category,  my 
own  day's  halt  in  Rivera  was  entirely  by  choice ;  but  for  those  more  in 
haste  than  curious  for  a  glimpse  of  Brazilian  life  it  is  cheaper,  faster, 
and  more  comfortable  to  make  the  journey  by  sea. 

The  daily  train  northward  leaves  Santa  Anna  at  7  135,  which  is  seven 
by  Uruguayan  time,  and  I  was  dragged  out  of  bed  at  an  unearthly  hour 
for  midwinter  June  to  find  the  world  weighed  down  under  a  dense, 
bone-soaking  blanket  of  fog.  The  street  lamps  of  both  countries,  judg- 
ing davlight  by  the  calendar  rather  than  by  the  facts,  kept  going  out 
just  half  a  block  ahead  of  me  as  I  stumbled  through  the  impenetrable 
gloom,  the  streets  by  no  means  improving  at  the  frontier.  I  might 
have  crossed  this  without  formality  had  I  not  chosen  to  wake  the 
negro  guard  from  a  sound  sleep  in  his  kiosk  and  insist  upon  his  doing 
his  duty.  One  would  fancy  that  an  official  stationed  five  feet  from  a 
Spanish-speaking  countr}-  would  pick  up  a  few  words  of  that  language, 
vet  these  custom-house  negroes  professed  not  to  understand  a  word 
of  Spanish,  no  matter  how  much  it  sounded  like  their  native  Portu- 
guese. At  length,  with  a  growl  for  having  been  disturbed,  the  swarthy 
guardian  waved  a  hand  at  me  in  a  bored,  tropical  way,  drew  his  resplen- 
dent cloak  about  him  again,  and  stretched  out  once  more  on  his  wooden 
bench. 

It  was  a  long  mile  of  slippery  mud  and  warm  humidity  to  the  station, 
where  black  night  still  reigned  and  where  yet  another  African  official 
came  to  reznsar  my  baggage,  for  much  contraband  passes  this  frontier 
in  both  directions.  Finally  something  resembling  daybreak  forced  its 
reluctant  way  through  the  gray  mass  that  hung  over  and  crept  into 
everything,  and  our  narrow-gauge  half-freight  took  to  bumping  uncer- 
tainly northward.  What  a  change  from  the  clean,  comfortable,  equal- 
to-anyv.here  trains  of  Uruguay!  Even  our  "primeiro,"  with  its  two 
seats  on  one  side  of  the  aisle  and  one  on  the  other,  was  as  untidy, 
unmended,  slovenly  as  the  government  railways  of  Chile,  and  every 


BUMPING  UP  TO  RIO  141 

mile  forward  seemed  to  bring  one  that  much  nearer  the  heart  of  happy- 
go-lucky  Latin-America. 

I  wrapped  myself  in  all  the  garments  I  possessed,  regretting  that  I 
owned  no  overcoat,  as  we  shivered  jerkily  onward  across  a  wild, 
shaggv,  mist-heavy  country  inhabited  only  by  cattle  and  with  no  stop- 
ping-place all  the  morning,  except  Rosario,  entitled  to  consider  itse'f 
a  town.  I  fell  to  reading  a  Porto  Alegre  newspaper  of  a  day  or  two 
before,  for  as  I  could  usually  guess  the  meaning  of  the  spoken  tongue, 
so  I  could  read  Portuguese,  like  a  man  skating  over  thin  ice — as  long  as 
I  kept  swiftly  going  all  was  well,  but  if  I  stopped  to  examine  a  word 
closely,  I  was  lost.  Brazilians  would  have  you  believe  that  Portuguese 
is  a  purer  form  of  the  tongue  from  which  Spanish  is  descended;  Span- 
ish-speaking South  Americans  assert  that  Portuguese  is  a  degenerate 
dialect  of  their  own  noble  language  and  even  go  so  far  as  to  refer  to  it 
privately  as  "lingua  de  macacos,"  of  which  phrase  the  last  word  is  the 
Portuguese  term  for  monkey.  Thanks  to  my  long  familiarity  with  their 
tongue  I  found  myself  siding  with  the  Castilian  branch  of  the  family. 

On  the  printed  page  it  was  hard  to  treat  this  new  tongue  with  due 
seriousness.  I  found  myself  unable  to  shake  off  the  impression  that 
the  writer  had  never  learned  to  spell,  or  at  least  had  not  been  able  to 
force  his  learning  upon  the  printer.  The  stuff  looked  as  if  the  latter 
had  "pied''  the  form,  and  then  had  not  had  time  to  find  all  the  letters 
again  or  have  the  proof  corrected.  Thus  cattle,  instead  of  being 
ganado,  as  it  should  be,  was  merely  gado ;  general  had  shrunk  to  geral, 
and  to  make  matters  worse  still  more  letters  were  dropped  in  forming 
the  plural,  so  that  such  monstrosities  as  gcracs  and  aiitouiobcis  shrieked 
at  the  reader  in  every  line.  Fancy  calling  tea  eJid;  think  of  writing 
esmola  when  you  mean  limosna!  It  suggested  dialect  invented  by  a 
small  Spanish  boy  so  angry  he  "wouldn't  play  any  more,"  and  who  had 
taken  to  horribly  mispronouncing  and  absurdly  misspelling  the  tongue 
of  himself  and  his  playmates,  }et  who  had  not  originality  enough  to 
form  a  really  new  language.  And  what  a  treacherous  language !  The 
short,  simple,  everyday  words  were  the  very  ones  most  apt  to  be  en- 
tirely different ;  thus  dos  was  no  longer  "two"  but  "of  the" ;  "two"  was 
now  dais  in  the  masculine  and  duas  in  the  feminine,  and  there  was  still 
a  dous — the  plural  form,  I  suppose.  A  trapiche  was  no  longer  a  primi- 
tive sugarmill,  but  a  warehouse ;  a  cigar  had  become  a  mere  charuto. 
The  Portuguese  seemed  to  avoid  the  letter  "1"  as  zealously  as  do  the 
Japanese,  replacing  it  by  "r" — la  plaza  had  been  deformed  into  a  praca, 
el  plato  had  become  o  prato.    Where  they  were  not  doubHng  the  "n," 


142  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

central  y  to  all  rules  of  Castilian  spelling,  they  were  leaving  it  out 
entirely,  and  one  was  asked  to  admire  the  silvery  rays  of  a  lua!  A  man 
had  been  brought  before  a  judge  because  he  had  seen  fit  to  cspancar  his 
wife,  yet  the  context  showed  that  it  was  no  case  of  the  applica'.ion  of 
the  corrective  slipper.  I  was  reading  along  as  smoothly  and  calmly  as 
in  English  when  all  at  once  the  headline  "Esposicao  International  de 
Borrachas  em  Londres"  struck  my  eye.  Valgame  Dios !  An  Interna- 
tional Exposition  of  Drunken  Women!  Seven  thousand  miles  away, 
too!  And  why  in  London,  rather  than  in  Glasgow?  That  particular 
headline  would  have  cost  me  much  mental  anguish  had  I  not  had  the 
foresight  in  Montevideo  to  buy  a  "Portuguez-Hespanhol"  pocket  vocab- 
ulary. And  what,  of  all  things,  should  horracha  be,  in  this  absurd, 
mispronounced  dialect,  but  rubber,  and  no  drunken  woman  at  all,  thus 
depriving  the  article  at  once  of  all  interest ! 

The  chief  trouble  with  written  Portuguese  is  that  it  has  never  been 
operated  on  for  appendicitis.  Parts  that  have  long  since  ceased  to 
function  have  not  been  cut  off,  as  in  the  close-cropped  Spanish,  and 
such  words  as  simples,  fructa,  and  the  like  retain  their  useless  un- 
pronounced  letters  until  the  written  word  is  almost  as  absurdly  unlike 
the  spoken  one  as  in  English.  Yet  the  tongue  of  Brazil  has  at  least  the 
advantage  that  it  is  in  some  ways  easier  to  pronounce  than  Spanish. 
The  guttural  Castilian  j,  for  exam.ple,  over  which  the  foreign  tongue 
almost  invariably  stum.bles,  is  missing,  and  while  few  Americans  can 
say  jefe  in  the  Spanish  fashion  they  can  all  give  it  the  Portuguese 
sound  "shefe";  and  if  me  j  or  Xz.y.es  the  Anglo-Saxon  palate,  melhor  is 
perfectly  easy.  Moreover,  life  is  a  constant  holiday  in  Portuguese. 
Domingo  and  sabbado  are  days  of  rest  under  any  name ;  but  it  seems 
unwise  to  mislead  a  naturally  indolent  people  into  thinking  that  every 
day  is  a  "feast  day"  by  calling  Monday  "second  festival,"  Tuesday  "third 
festival"  and  so  on,  forcing  the  stranger  to  do  some  finger  and  toe 
counting  to  find  that  quarta-feira,  or  "fourth  festival,"  was  none  other 
than  this  very  Wednesday  so  foggily  hanging  about  us.  To  hear  the 
kinky-haired  trainman  tell  me  in  a  long  series  of  mispronunciations  that 
if  I  chose  to  let  this  one  go  on  without  me  I  could  get  another  train  at 
"twenty : thirty-two  on  fifth  feast-day"  required  some  nimble  mental 
exertion  to  figure  out  that  the  lunatic  was  trying  to  say  8 :32  P.  M.  on 
Thursday. 

The  line  out  of  Santa  Anna  is  really  a  branch  of  the  long  and  im- 
portant one  from  Uruguayana  on  the  Uruguay  River,  dividing  Brazil 
from  the  Argentine,  to  the  large  "lagoon  towns"  of  Pelotas  and  Rio 


BUMPING  UP  TO  RIO  143 

Grande  on  the  Atlantic.  About  noon  \vc  tumbled  out  of  our  rattlinj? 
conveyance  at  Cacequy  and  took  another  tr?in,  on  the  line  to  Porto 
Alegre,  capital  of  the  enormous  "estado  gaucho,"  or  "cowboy  state," 
southernmost  of  Brazil  and  larger  than  all  Uruguay.  It  rambled  in 
and  about  low  hills,  with  an  excellent  grazinj^  country  spread  out  to 
the  horizon  on  every  hand,  and  at  four — he^  pardon,  sixteen  o'clock — 
set  us  down  at  the  considerable  town  of  Santa  Maria  on  a  knoll  among 
wooded  hills,  the  junction  where  those  bound  for  the  capital  of  the 
state  must  take  leave  of  those  on  their  way  to  the  capital  of  the  repub- 
lic. I  v.'as  privileged  to  occupy  room  No.  i  in  the  chief  hotel  of  the 
town,  which  was  no  doubt  a  high  honor.  But  as  it  chanced  to  be  be- 
tween the  front  door  of  the  building  and  the  cobbled  entrance  corridor, 
with  either  window  or  door  opening  directly  on  crowds  of  impudent 
newsboys,  lottery  vendors,  and  servants,  it  was  not  unlike  being  be- 
tween the  devil — or  at  least  a  swarm  of  his  progeny — and  the  deep  sea. 
Indeed,  it  quickly  became  evident  that  Brazilian  hotels  of  the  interior 
would  prove  no  better  than  those  in  the  three  southern  countries  of 
South  America,  where  the  traveler  is  expected  to  pay  a  fortune  for  the 
privilege  of  tossing  out  the  night  on  a  hilly  cot  and  where  the  meals  never 
A-ary  an  iota, — beginning  unfailingly  with  Hambrc,  or  thin  slices  of  cold 
meat,  and  hurrying  through  several  dishes  of  hot  meat,  down  to  the 
inevitable  dulce  de  mcinhrillo,  a  hard  quince  jelly  which  is  the  sad 
ending  of  all  meals  at  the  lower  end  of  South  America.  Nowhere  does 
the  Latin-American's  lack  of  initiative  show  more  clearly  than  in  the 
kitchen.  To  increase  my  gloom,  the  French  proprietress,  whose  every 
glance  caused  my  thin  pocketbook  to  writhe  with  fear,  manipulated  the 
items  so  cleverly  that,  though  placards  on  the  walls  announced  the  rate 
as  seven  milrcis  a  day,  and  I  was  there  only  from  sunset  until  a  little 
after  sunrise,  she  handed  me  a  bill  for  13,500  rds! 

Luckily  I  had  already  weathered  the  first  shock  of  the  traveler  who 
•omes  rudely  in  contact  with  the  Brazilian  money  system,  but  I  paid 
miser-faced  old  madame  in  a  daze,  and  retired  to  a  quiet  corner  to 
figure  up  the  exact  extent  of  the  disaster  that  had  befallen  me.  On  due 
reflection  it  proved  to  be  not  quite  so  overwhelming  as  it  had  sounded. 
Even  when  they  are  reduced  to  real  money  Brazilian  prices  are  not 
mild,  but  they  are  by  no  means  so  utterly  insane  as  they  sound.  The 
monetary  unit  is  the  real,  in  theory  only,  for  no  such  coin  exists,  and 
in  practice  only  the  plural  rcis  is  used,  the  real  unit  being  the  inilreis, 
one  thousand  rcis.  For  years  the  milrcis  had  remained  at  the  fixed 
value  of  fifteen  to  the  English  pound.     In  larger  transactions — and 


144  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

most  transactions  are  large  in  Brazil — the  unit  is  the  conto,  one  million 
reis,  about  $325.  Gold  is  never  seen  in  circulation.  Between  the  mil- 
reis  and  the  conto  there  are  paper  notes,  usually  printed  in  New  York ; 
silver  coins  from  five  hundred  to  two  thousand  reis,  and  nickel  pieces 
of  four,  two,  and  one  hundred  complete  the  list  in  common  circulation. 
Lastly,  lest  the  unwarned  stranger  be  led  astray  by  appearances,  the 
Brazilian  places  his  dollar  sign  after  the  milrcis  and  before  the  reis, 
so  that  3$250  means  the  normal  equivalent  of  an  American  dollar,  and 
the  man  who  pays  $500  for  a  newspaper  or  a  small  glass  of  iced  cane- 
juice  does  not  feel  that  he  has  been  unusually  extravagant — at  least 
if  he  has  lived  long  enough  in  Brazil  to  get  the  local  point  of  view. 

A  pair  of  German  peasants  sat  in  a  corner  of  the  second-class  coach 
when  we  pulled  out  of  Santa  Maria.  Theirs  were  the  same  honest, 
wrinkled,  hard-working,  unimaginative  faces  one  sees  in  rural  Ger- 
many. The  w^oman,  with  a  kerchief  over  her  head  and  her  bare  feet 
thrust  into  low  slippers,  was  as  devoid  of  feminine  coquettishness  as 
of  desire  for  adornment,  a  picture  of  the  plodding,  toilsome  helpmate 
of  the  thoroughly  Teuton  farmer  at  her  side.  Yet  I  found  that  they 
had  never  been  outside  the  southernmost  state  of  Brazil,  though  they 
spoke  German  with  far  more  ease  than  they  did  Portuguese,  and  their 
appearance  would  not  have  attracted  the  slightest  attention  in  the  very 
heart  of  Germany. 

The  three  fertile  southern  states  of  Brazil  are  on  an  elevated  plateau 
•hat  makes  them  excellent  cereal  and  fruit  regions  well  suited  as  a 
s:)ermanent  habitation  of  the  white  race.  All  that  portion  of  Brazil 
Delow  Rio  de  Janeiro  is  of  comparatively  recent  settlement.  During 
the  colonial  period  Portuguese  energy  was  directed  almost  exclusively 
CO  the  semi-tropical  and  tropical  regions  of  the  north,  to  Bahia  and 
Pernambuco,  where  rich  tobacco  and  sugar  plantations  could  be  worked 
with  slave  labor,  or  to  the  gold  and  diamond  lands  of  the  interior,  with 
their  special  attractions  to  impatient  fortune  hunters.  The  splendid 
pasture  lands  of  the  temperate  zone  were  scorned  by  these  eager  ad- 
venturers; maps  printed  as  late  as  1865  bear  across  all  these  southern 
provinces  the  words  "unknown  and  inhabited  by  wild  Indians." 

The  Germans,  to  be  sure,  had  begun  to  appear  before  that.  Barely 
had  the  exiled  emperor  of  Portugal  settled  down  in  1808,  to  rule  his 
immense  OAcrseas  domain  when  he  set  about  filling  in  its  waste  spaces 
by  an  immigration  policy  that  is  to  this  day  continued  by  the  states 
themselves.  Not  only  Dom  Joao  but  his  successors,  the  two  Dom 
Pedros,  turned  to  Switzerland  and  Germany  for  the  hardy  settlers 


BUMPING  UP  TO  RIO  145 

reeded  to  tame  this  south-temperate  wilderness.  The  first  official 
C-crman  colony  in  Brazil  was  founded  in  the  state  of  Rio  Grande  do 
Sul,  and  for  twenty-five  years  Teutonic  settlers  were  established  at 
many  different  points,  chiefly  in  the  three  southernmost  states,  in  some 
cases  as  far  north  as  Minas  Geraes.  But  in  1859  the  German  j^overn- 
mcnt  forbade  emi;  ration  to  Brazil.  The  original  settlers  are  therefore 
long  since  dead  and  the  present  inhabitants  are  of  the  third  or  fourth 
j-cneration,  born  in  Brazil,  and  with  little  more  than  a  traditional  feel- 
h'^  for  the  Fatherland,  Yet  it  is  a  peculiarity  of  South  American 
civilization  that  it  does  not  impose  itself  upon  European  immigration  to 
liny  such  degree  as  does  that  of  the  United  States.  Ask  the  man  whose 
father,  or  even  grandfather,  emigrated  from  Germany  to  Brazil  what 
1  is  nationality  is  and  he  is  almost  certain  to  reply,  without  any  con- 
sciousness of  the  strangeness  of  his  answer,  "Ich  bin  Dcutsch."  If 
the  German  has  remained  a  German  in  Brazil,  it  is  perhaps  as  much 
the  fault  of  the  Brazilian  environment  as  by  his  own  choice.  There 
are  cities  in  the  southern  states  of  Brazil  so  German  that  men  and 
women  born  in  them  speak  not  a  word  of  Portuguese.  This  is  par- 
ticularly frequent  in  the  district  about  Porto  Alegre  and  in  the  "lagoon 
country"  between  there  and  the  Uruguayan  boundary.  Joinville,  in 
Santa  Catharina,  named  for  a  German  prince  who  married  the  daugh- 
ter of  an  emperor  of  Brazil,  is  so  German  that  the  Portuguese  tongue 
attracts  attention  in  the  streets,  as  it  does  in  several  other  of  the  thir- 
teen colonies  founded  before  the  ban  was  placed  on  German  emigra- 
tion. Even  the  inhabitants  who  speak  Portuguese  do  so  with  diffi- 
culty and  with  a  strong  Teutonic  accent.  The  school  teachers  of  these 
former  colonies  are  subsidized  German  pastors ;  the  German  element  is 
so  strong  as  often  to  elect  a  German  state  president — the  states  of 
Brazil  have  presidents  rather  than  governors.  For  several  years  all  office 
holders  in  Santa  Catharina,  with  the  exception  of  the  Federal  Court, 
appointed  in  Rio,  were  Germans,  and  the  anomaly  of  Brazilian  govern- 
ment reports  written  by  men  who  scarcely  knew  the  language  of  the 
country  in  which  they  ruled  was  by  no  means  unusual. 

It  is  estimated  that  there  are  now  about  a  million  descendants  of 
Germans  in  the  three  or  four  southern  states  of  Brazil,  a  territory 
approximately  as  large  as  our  "solid  south"  east  of  the  Mississippi. 
Their  adopted  country  was  liberal  to  the  early  settlers,  allotting  175 
acres  of  land  to  each  immigrant,  though  this  has  been  much  reduced  in 
individual  cases  by  speculative  abuses.  Not  until  1896  was  the  Ger- 
man edict  against  migration  to  Brazil  removed,  and  by  that  time  the 


146  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

southern  states  had  attracted  new  settlers,  particularly  from  Italy. 
The  state  of  Sao  Paulo,  for  instance,  has  built  up  her  great  coffee  in- 
dustry and  factory  production  chiefly  on  Italian  immigration.  The 
Germans  are  said  always  to  seek  the  lower  lands  and  the  river  bottoms, 
raising  especially  pigs  and  vegetables,  while  the  Italians  plant  the  high 
ridges  farther  back  from  the  sea  with  corn  and  grapes,  with  the  result 
that  such  towns  as  Garabaldi  and  Novo  Hamburgo,  Blumenau  and 
Angelina,  are  but  a  cannon-shot  apart. 

Where  the  great  Lagoa  dos  Patos  opens  to  the  sea  at  the  town  of 
Rio  Grande,  on  sandy,  onion-growing  flats  that  follow  two  hundred 
miles  of  shifting  sand  dunes  from  Imbituba  southv/ard,  is  a  hot,  often 
sand-beaten  point  once  ruled  by  powerful  British  firms.  It  is  nearly 
a  hundred  miles  up  this  "inland  sea"  to  the  capital  of  the  state,  with 
r^oOjOOO  inhabitants,  which  with  the  large  tovm  of  Pelotas  is  the  great 
port  of  em.barkation  of  the  xarque,  as  the  tasajo,  or  thick  dried  beef, 
of  the  Argentine  is  called  in  Brazil.  One  by  one  the  German  traders 
crowded  out  their  competitors  in  this  region ;  with  the  docile  popula- 
tion of  the  "lagoon  cities"  racially  friendly  to  them  they  established  a 
virtual  German  monopoly  of  German  commercial  and  financial  houses 
in  cooperation  with  German  shipping.  Where  the  German  ruled  there 
was  no  room  for  any  other  European  or  American,  not  even  for  Bra- 
zilian, industry,  and  in  each  of  these  coastal  cities  of  southern  Brazil 
a  great  German  firm  was  supreme  dictator  before  the  World  War, 
which  was  not  the  least  of  the  many  causes  of  that  war.  What  advan- 
tages these  uncrowned  rulers  of  their  million  unsophisticated  and  often 
unconscious  subjects  might  have  taken  in  establishing  themselves  and 
their  Fatherland  more  firmly  in  Brazil  if  the  world  conflict  had  ended 
differently  is  of  course  now  a  purely  academic  question. 

The  lines  of  southern  Brazil  could  scarcely  be  made  a  real  railroad 
in  the  American  sense  without  complete  rebuilding,  for  they  constantly 
squirm  and  twist  and  wind  their  way  over  the  lightly  rolling  country, 
seeking  always  the  higher  levels  and  never  by  any  chance  running  for 
a  yard  straight  forward.  One  of  the  trainmen  asserted  that  if  a  cow 
got  in  the  way  of  the  surveyors  who  laid  out  the  line,  they  moved  the 
transit  rather  than  exert  themselves  to  go  and  drive  her  away.  Less 
facetious  cfiFicials  explained  that  the  engines  are  so  w-eak  that  anything 
steeper  than  a  one  per  cent,  grade  was  avoided  in  the  building,  and  that 
this  was  done  on  contract  by  Brazilians  and  by  the  mile.  From  the 
car-windows  we  had  frequent  views  of  the  engineer  and  the  fireman  in 
their  cab ;  we  dartetl  from  side  to  side  so  often  that  it  would  have  been 


BUMPING  UP  TO  RIO  147 

vasy  to  imagine  the  little  engine  in  terror  of  the  many  wide-horned 
cattle  scattered  over  the  rolling  landscape.  The  brakes  were  frequently 
called  upon  to  keep  us  from  running  over  the  time-table ;  stations  or 
crossings  w-ere  so  rare  that  the  whistle  was  uncomfortably  startling; 
at  the  rare  places  where  we  did  officially  stop  an  extended  argument 
usually  arose  between  the  station  master  in  his  red  cap  and  the  train- 
men in  their  blue  ones  as  to  when  it  would  be  fitting  and  advisable  to 
jolt  onward. 

Beyond  the  large  town  of  Passo  Fundo  appeared,  first  singly,  then 
in  roomy  clusters,  the  splendid  pinhciro  araucarai,  the  slender  yet 
sturdy  Brazilian  pine-tree,  erect  and  entirely  free  from  branches  to  the 
very  top,  from  which  these  suddenly  spread  thickly  out  at  right  angles 
to  the  trunk.  The  parasol-pine  makes  excellent  lumber,  being  lighter 
yet  stronger  than  our  northern  pine,  but  above  all  it  beautifies  the 
landscape.  The  rare  small  clumps  of  it  in  the  hollows  became  more  and 
more  numerous  until,  at  Erechim,  we  found  ourselves  in  an  entire 
forest  of  parasol-pines,  with  an  atmosphere  strikingly  like  our  northern 
lumber  woods.  The  weather  had  grown  so  warm  that  in  the  middle  of 
the  day  it  was  micomfortable  to  sit  in  the  unshaded  car  window,  and 
creepers  and  lianas  were  beginning  to  appear  in  the  semi-tropical  for- 
ests, silent  but  for  the  song  of  the  treetoad. 

I  descended  at  the  station  of  Erebango  to  spend  the  "Fourth"  with  a 
fellow-countryman  in  charge  of  the  construction  of  a  branch  railway 
through  the  Jewish  "Colonia  Ouatro  Irmaos."  At  the  station  was 
gathered  a  group  of  Semitic  immigrants  just  arrived  from  Europe,  still 
in  the  same  heavy  garb  and  wool  caps  in  which  they  had  left  their 
wintry  home.  We  boarded  the  constructor's  "motor  gallego,"  a  hand- 
car pumped  by  four  lusty  Galicians,  and  struck  out  in  company  with 
the  Jewish  manager  of  the  colony.  Each  Jew  was  given  upon  arrival 
a  piece  of  land  and  some  stock,  the  latter  to  be  paid  for  after  he  got  his 
start.  For  an  hour  we  pumped  our  way  through  semi-tropical  forest, 
here  and  there  broken  by  clearings  scattered  with  light-colored  v.'ooden 
houses,  to  come  out  upon  a  more  open  rolling  country  suggestive  of 
Uruguay  but  with  clumps  of  the  beautiful  parasol-pine  in  the  hol'ows. 
Then  I  was  furnished  a  horse  and  rode  away  over  the  ridges,  visiting 
a  score  of  Jewish  families.  It  being  Saturday,  they  were  dressed  in 
their  Sabbath  best,  some  of  them,  who  had  lived  in  the  United  States, 
as  overdressed  as  Irish  "hired  girls"  going  to  mass.  Men,  women,  and 
children  were  gathered  in  large  groups  drinking  schnaps,  and  several 
of  the  men,  in  low-crowned  derbies,  grew  confidential  and  told  me  they 


148  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

wished  they  were  back  in  "Ileshter  Schtreet."  I  spoke  German  to 
their  Yiddish,  as  I  did  Spanish  to  my  peon's  Portuguese,  and  not  only 
carried  on  conversation  easily  but  several  times  acted  as  interpreter. 
The  little  unpainted  houses  were  tolerably  clean,  with  cheap  lace  cur- 
tains ;  and  schoolhouses  were  being  built.  But  though  some  of  them 
had  been  here  for  months,  there  was  little  evidence  of  any  work  being 
done  by  the  colonists  themselves.  One  got  the  impression  that  they 
preferred  to  live  on  the  charity  of  the  association  and  its  wealthy 
European  sponsors  rather  than  indulge  in  physical  exertion  under  the 
semi-tropical  sun,  and  one  wondered  if  it  was  possible  to  make  a  farmer 
out  of  the  Jew,  whether  the  colonists  were  not  merely  waiting  for  a 
town  to  grow  up,  that  they  might  go  and  sell  things  to  one  another. 
The  railway  company  of  southern  Brazil,  which  is  British-American, 
as  well  as  the  Brazilian  Government,  is  favoring  such  immigration,  but 
a  casual  glimpse  of  the  colony  did  not  suggest  that  this  was  the  best 
means  of  bringing  the  fertile  waste  places  of  the  republic  into  pro- 
ductive activity. 

The  tri-weekly  train  picked  me  up  two  days  later,  the  privacy  of  my 
narrow-gauge  dormitorio  being  again  unbroken.  Hour  after  hour  we 
rambled  on  in  leisurely  tropical  fashion.  The  water  tanks  were  not  at 
the  stations  but  wherever  streams  gave  a  supply,  thereby  increasing 
the  number  of  stops.  Once  a  horse  got  on  the  track  and  ran  for  seven 
miles  ahead  of  the  tooting  little  engine,  refusing  to  leave  the  rails  even 
when  the  fireman  got  off  and  threw  imported  coal  at  it  while  the  train 
crept  on  after  him.  To  have  run  into  the  animal  would  probably  have 
spilled  our  toy  locomotive  down  the  embankment  of  red  earth.  Finally 
a  group  of  Polish  men  and  women  gathered  on  the  track  ahead  and 
forced  the  weary  beast  to  take  to  the  matta,  the  jungled  wilderness 
that  shut  us  in.  At  another  stop  the  station-master,  a  pale  blond  who 
spoke  German  but  who  sold  tickets  like  a  Latin-American,  w^ould  net 
give  the  engineer  the  signal  to  start  until  he  had  sent  a  boy  to  drive  his 
ducks  out  from  under  the  engine  where  they  were  lolling  in  the  shade. 
The  number  of  curs  prowling  about  the  stations  made  it  easy  to  believe 
a  joker's  assertion  that  the  dogs  know  the  train  schedule  and  line  up 
along  the  track  in  proper  time  and  place  for  their  tri-weekly  banquet 
from  the  dining-car.  Here  was  the  most  costly  part  of  the  line,  built 
by  American  engineers,  many  bridges  and  viaducts  lifting  it  across 
deep  wooded  gullies  with  wonderful  vistas  of  tree-tops,  the  dark  green 
of  the  pinheiro  still  predominating  in  the  sky-line. 

At  iMarcellino  Ramos  a  big  bridge   carried  us  across  the   River 


BUMPING  UP  TO  RIO  I49 

Uruguay,  which  not  only  rises  in  Brazil  but  forms  the  boundary  be- 
tween its  two  southernmost  states.  Through  trains  had  been  operated 
on  this  line  for  less  than  a  year.  Before  that  the  overland  traveler 
from  Montevideo  to  Rio  had  to  stop  six  times  overnight  on  the  way 
and  had  often  to  be  poled  across  dangerous  rivers.  Then  one  crossed 
the  Uruguay  at  Marcellino  Ramos  in  the  darkness  on  a  crazy  launch 
operated  by  a  crazier  Brazilian  who  let  go  the  steering-wheel  to  roll 
cigarettes  and  who  generally  succeeded  in  drowning  some  of  the  bag- 
gage, if  not  the  passengers.  The  launch  landed  its  cargo  at  the  foot  of  a 
steep  muddy  slope  more  than  a  hundred  feet  high,  at  the  top  of  which 
travelers  fought  for  the  privilege  of  paying  a  fortune  for  a  plank  to  lie 
on  and  for  such  stufT  as  the  predatory  keeper  of  what  he  miscalled  a 
hotel  saw  fit  to  provide  for  stifling  their  appetites. 

Here  we  left  the  enormous  "gauclio  state"  behind  and  struck  off 
across  the  narrow  state  of  Santa  Catharina.  through  which  we  follow-ed 
the  placid  Rio  do  Peixe,  or  Fish  River,  for  a  hundred  and  sixty-five 
miles,  passing  several  waterfalls.  The  wooded  scrra  of  Santa  Catharina 
/ose  ^lightly  into  the  sky,  and  on  all  sides  the  world  was  thickly  clothed 
with  jungle,  though  there  were  occasional  small  clearings  with  clusters  of 
crude  new  shanties.  In  places  the  palm  grew  close  beside  the  parasol- 
pine.  Groups  of  ponies  under  clumsy  native  saddles  were  tied  to  posts 
or  wooden  rails  before  the  annazcm  inside  which  their  owners  were 
drinking  away  their  Sunday.  Blonds  predominated  at  the  rare  sta- 
tions, tow-heads  covered  by  kerchiefs  peered  from  every  doorwav  of 
the  houses,  w^ith  their  concave  shingled  roofs.  Most  of  them  seemed  to 
be  Poles,  and  as  all  the  way  from  Santa  Maria  northward  the  soil  had 
been  a  rich  dark-red,  domestic  animals,  children,  and  the  garments  of 
the  peasants  themselves  were  dyed  in  that  hue.  Some  of  the  dwellings 
were  like  the  plans  of  old  Nuremburg  brought  to  the  tropics  and  set 
down  in  the  midst  of  the  wilderness.  There  is  a  great  difference  be- 
tween living  conditions  in  this  region,  where  land  is  rarely  more  than 
five  dollars  an  acre,  and  Illinois,  for  example,  with  its  schools,  roads, 
and  community  interests,  yet  settlers  found  much  the  same  pioneer 
conditions  as  this  in  Illinois  when  land  was  five  dollars  an  acre  there, 
and  in  addition  winters  of  snow^  and  ice. 

In  my  sleeper,  which  had  not  had  another  passenger  since  it  began 
its  journey  at  the  Uruguayan  boundary,  the  porter  seemed  to  be  hurt 
that  anyone  should  intrude  upon  his  privacy.  But  if  there  was  room 
to  spare  in  my  car,  the  second-class  coaches  were  sufficiently  packed 
to  mal:e  up  for  it.    Brazilian  railway  rules  require  that  persons  without 


ISO  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGO>:iA 

shoes  or  coats  shall  not  ride  first-class,  hence  it  may  have  been  some- 
thing more  than  price  that  made  the  wooden-benched  cars  so  popular. 
Even  the  first-class  passenger-list  had  grown  more  and  more  shady 
and  there  was  something  absorbing  in  the  sight  of  pure  white  waiters 
serving  and  kowtowing  to  mulattoes  and  part-Indians  in  the  swaying 
dining-car.  To  strangers,  or  at  least  to  "gringos,"  the  waiters  always 
brought  the  change  in  200-reis  nickel  pieces  and  in  silver  milreis, 
which  look  almost  exactly  alike,  carefully  laid  face  down  on  the  plai;e 
in  the  hope  that  a  natural  error  would  increase  their  tips. 

I  was  aware  of  our  being  frequently  stalled  on  some  slight  grade 
during  the  night,  yet  when  I  finally  awoke,  to  a  cold  clear  sunrise,  we 
had  crossed  the  River  Iguassu  into  the  state  of  Parana,  with  an  inter- 
tropical vegetation  and  many  serrarias,  or  sawmills.  Nearly  all  the 
morning  we  passed  what  I  at  first  took  to  be  small  wild  orange  trees, 
some  ten  feet  high  and  set  in  rows  and  trimmed,  with  very  dark  green 
leaves  not  unlike  those  of  the  elm  in  shape.  Toward  noon  I  learned 
that  this  was  the  hcrva  matte,  known  to  us  as  ''Paraguayan  tea,"  and 
the  most  important  product  of  the  states  of  Santa  Catharina  and 
Parana,  as  cattle  are  of  Rio  Grande  do  Sul  and  coffee  of  Sao  Paulo. 
The  gathering  season  was  now  at  hand,  but  had  not  begun  because  the 
woods  were  full  of  revolutionists,  an  argument  between  the  two  matte- 
growing  states  having  given  a  good  excuse  to  several  hundred  bandits 
whom  the  pusillanimous  central  government  showed  no  abilit}'  to  cope 
with  during  all  my  stay  in  Brazil. 

The  hcrva  matte  is  an  evergreen  shrub  of  the  holly  family,  averaging 
twelve  feet  in  height,  which  has  its  habitat  exclusively  in  the  temperate 
regions  of  eastern  South  America  at  an  elevation  of  from  fifteen  hun- 
dred to  three  thousand  feet.  In  Parana  alone  it  is  distributed  over 
150,000  square  kilometers,  and  it  is  found  in  six  other  states,  as  well 
as  in  Paraguay  and  northeastern  Argentine.  It  grows  wild,  and  the 
only  cultivation  it  needs  is  the  cutting  avv-ay  of  the  jungle  about  it. 
Each  bush  produces  annually  some  two  hundred  pounds  of  leaves  and 
branch-ends,  which  are  reduced  to  about  half  that  amount  in  the 
"factory.''  Here  the  sacks  of  dried  leaves  and  sticks  that  come  in 
from  the  sertdo  go  through  a  stamping-mill  that  beats  them  almost  to  a 
powder,  after  which  the  product  is  wrapped  in  hundred-pound  lots  in 
wet.  hairy  cowhides  that  shrink  as  they  dry  until  the  bundle  is  stone- 
hard.  Great  numbers  of  these  deceptive  looking  bales  may  be  seen  at 
the  warehouses  and  stations  in  the  matte  states. 

The  descendants   of   the   conquistadores   acquired   the   malte   habit 


BUMPING  UP  TO  RIO  151 

from  the  Guarani  Indians,  and  it  has  become  not  merely  an  antidote 
for  an  excessive  meat  diet  but  a  social  custom  all  the  way  from  the 
coffee-fields  of  Brazil  to  Patagonia.  In  former  years  hcri'a  matte  was 
called  "Jesuits'  tea,"  for  the  same  reason  that  quinine  was  introduced  to 
Europe  as  "Jesuits'  bark,"  because  the  disciples  of  Loyola  first  taught 
the  Indian  to  gather  it  for  trade  purposes.  About  it  has  grown  up  a 
complete  system  of  etiquette  and  throughout  all  rural  southeastern  South 
America  the  matte  bowl  is  the  cup  of  greeting  and  of  farewell ;  not  to 
offer  it  to  a  visitor,  even  a  total  stranger,  upon  his  arrival  is  as  serious 
an  offense  as  for  the  visitor  to  refuse  it.  The  bowl  is  a  dry,  hollow 
gourd  about  the  size  and  shape  of  a  large  pear,  into  the  open  top  of 
which  is  thrust  a  reed  or  a  metal  bombilla.  Through  this  each  person 
sucks  the  somewhat  bitter  brew  as  the  gourd  passes  from  hand  to  hand 
around  the  circle,  amid  aimless  gossip  in  keeping  with  the  manana 
temperament  of  the  drinkers,  every  third  or  fourth  person  handing  it 
back  to  the  servant — who  is  not  infrequently  the  taciturn  woman  of  the 
liouse  herself— silently  waiting  with  a  patience  possible  only  among 
Latin-Americans  or  real  Orientals  to  proceed  to  the  kitchen  and  refill 
the  gourd  with  boiling  water.  Matte  is  cheaper  than  tea,  for  though 
more  leaves  are  needed  for  an  infusion,  they  can  be  several  times  re- 
steeped  without  loss  in  flavor  and  strength.  Narcotic  in  its  influence, 
it  has  none  of  the  after-effects  of  tea  or  coffee,  but  has  on  the  contrary 
many  medicinal  properties,  being  a  blood  purifier,  tonic,  laxative,  febri- 
fuge, and  stimulant  to  the  digestive  organs.  The  per  capita  consumption 
of  matte  in  the  state  of  Parana  is  ten  pounds  a  year,  vast  quantities  being 
exported ;  but,  strangely  enough,  it  has  never  made  its  way  outside  South 
America,  though  foreigners  who  have  lived  there  come  to  demand  it  as 
loudly  as  the  natives. 

The  stations  were  usually  mere  stops  at  the  foot  of  knolls  on  which 
were  larger  or  smaller  clearings  and  a  few  paintless  new  shanties 
among  the  scanty  trees  and  charred  logs  that  marked  the  beginning  of 
man's  hand-to-hand  struggle  with  the  rampant  wilderness.  Line  after 
line  of  the  dark  green  parasol-pine-trees  lay  one  behind  the  other  to 
where  they  grew  blue-black  on  the  far  horizon.  The  increasing  density 
of  the  jungle  was  but  one  of  many  signs  that  we  were  gradually  ap- 
proaching the  real  tropics.  Each  night  the  sun  sank  blood-red  into  the 
boundless  sertoo,  the  symmetrical  pine-trees  standing  out  against  the 
still  faintly  blushing  sky  after  all  else  had  turned  black,  the  moon  a 
silver  blotch  through  the  rising  mist,  out  of  which  the  sunrise  broke 
each  morning  and  spread  swiftly  across  the  still  trackless  wilderness. 


t52  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

One  afternoon  there  appeared  along  a  densely  green  tree-topped 
ridge  in  the  midst  of  rolling  half-prairie  the  reddish-white  town  of 
Ponta  Grossa.     Here  the  railway  broke  its  rule  and  carried  the  train 
up  to  the  place,  instead  of  leaving  the  climbing  to  the  passengers  them- 
selves.    \'ast  brown  vistas  opened  up  as  we  rose  to  the  level  of  the 
town,  picturesque  with  those  brick-and-mud  buildings  and  tile  roofs 
which  appear  so  quickly  wherever  forest  and  lumber  die  out.     Some- 
where I  had  acquired  a  letter  of  introduction  to  a  merchant  in  Ponta 
Grossa.    I  found  him  a  lady-like  little  old  man  with  evidences  of  some 
Indian  ancestry,  who  had  traveled  in  Europe  and  was  in  close  touch 
with  the  affairs  of  the  outside  world,  courteous  and  cultured,  yet  who 
still  clung  to  the  Moorish-Iberian  custom  of  considering  his  home  a 
harem.    For  though  I  should  much  rather  have  had  a  glimpse  of  Bra- 
zilian family  life,  he  permitted  me  to  dine  at  the  hotel  and  then  in- 
sisted on  spending  thousands  of  rcis  for  a  carriage  in  which  to  drive  me 
about  town.    No  Turkish  seraglio  is  more  jealous  of  its  privacy  than 
the  average  Brazilian  household ;  the  brief  explanation  that  "there  are 
women  there"  is  considered  ample  excuse  for  any  apparent  lack  of 
hospitality  to  men.    When  we  had  visited  the  sawmills,  the  matte  "fac- 
tory," and  the  waterworks-to-be  of  Ponta  Grossa,  my  outdoor  host 
insisted  on  driving  me  down  to  the  train,  asserting  that  the  scant  half- 
mile  was  too  far  to  walk,  and  saw  me  off  even  to  the  extent  of  buying 
a  platform  ticket  and  dismissing  me  with  an  embrace  and  a  basket  of 
tangarines  from  his  ow^n  garden. 

This  time  I  had  taken  the  branch  line  that  runs  a  hundred  and 
twenty  miles  eastward  to  Curityba,  capital  of  the  state  of  Parana,  with 
an  elevation  of  nearly  three  thousand  feet.  It  had  all  the  earmarks  of 
an  up-to-date  city,— electric-lights  and  clanging  street-cars,  automo- 
biles and  uniformed  policemen,  a  large  brewery  to  emphasize  the  Ger- 
man element,  though  other  Europeans  were  more  conspicuous.  Shops 
and  offices  opened  late,  the  dusting  being  barely  commenced  by  nine, 
while  schools,  as  everywhere  in  Brazil,  began  at  ten-thirty,  a  splendid 
training  in  indolence  for  after  life.  It  is  often  asserted  that  the  pre- 
dominance of  the  white  race  is  some  day  assured  in  southern  Brazil, 
that  all  the  country  below  Sao  Paulo  bids  fair  to  become  a  land  of 
blonds.  It  will  scarcely  be  a  pure  white  race,  however,  though  the 
mixture  that  is  constantly  going  on  makes  it  difficult  to  guess  what  the 
final  amalgam  will  be.  Curityba  certainly  had  no  color-line  prejudices. 
Here  a  coal-black  negro  girl  and  a  rosy-cheeked  young  Swedish 
woman  lolled  in  a  doorway  gossiping  and  laughing  together  like  bosom 


BUMPING  UP  TO  RIO  153 

companions ;  a  Pole  with  a  negro  wife  showed  off  his  mulatto  children 
as  if  he  were  proud  of  their  quaint  mahogany  complexions;  tow-headed 
Polish  brides  on  the  arm  of  jet-black  grooms  stared  proudly  out  upon 
the  passer-by  from  the  windows  of  photograph  galleries.  Attractive 
blond  girls  of  twenty  strolled  the  streets  in  bare  legs  and  slippers  as 
nonchalantly  as  tiie  slovenly  race  among  whom  they  had  been  thrown  ; 
women  from  eastern  Europe,  their  heads  covered  with  kerchiefs  and 
driving  little  wagonettes  filled  with  country  produce,  halted  to  pass 
the  time  of  day  with  African  street  loafers;  once  I  passed  a  girls'  school 
in  which  a  teacher  who  was  almost  an  albino  had  an  arm  thrown  affec- 
tionately about  another  who  would  have  been  invisible  against  a  black- 
board. 

Nearly  half  of  Brazil  consists  of  an  immense  plateau  between  two 
and  three  thousand  feet  above  sea-level,  falling  abruptly  into  the  At- 
lantic and  gradually  flattening  away  northwestward  into  the  great 
Amazon  basin.  Though  it  is  somewhat  larger  than  the  United  States 
without  its  dependencies,  Brazil  has  almost  no  mountains  except  an 
insignificant  range  along  the  coast,  and  almost  no  lakes.  Many  of  its 
rivers  rise  very  near  the  Atlantic,  but  instead  of  breaking  through  the 
low  coast  range  they  flow  inland,  those  in  the  southern  part  of  the 
country  finally  emptying  into  the  Plata  and  those  beyond  the  divide  into 
the  Amazon. 

The  branch  line  to  Curityba  descends  from  this  plateau  to  Paranagua 
on  the  coast,  the  first-class  coach  bringing  up  the  rear  of  a  daily  after- 
noon train  as  mixed  as  the  passengers  it  carried.  We  creaked  labori- 
ously through  heavy  forests  toward  a  fantastic  mountain  sky-line  far 
to  the  east,  some  of  the  vistas  as  striking  as  if  we  had  been  approaching 
the  Andes.  Headlong  streams  and  panoramas  of  tangled  hills  awak- 
ened the  vagabond  spirit  within  and  tempted  me  to  cast  aside  ease 
and  respectability  and  plunge  into  the  wilderness  out  of  sight  and 
sound  of  jangling  civilization.  For  a  time  we  followed  a  rivulet,  our 
little  wood-burning  Baldwin  spitting  showers  of  sparks  and  cinders 
back  upon  us ;  then  all  at  once  there  opened  out  down  a  great  gorge 
the  first  vista  since  I  had  crossed  the  Andes  from  Chile  of  what  might 
unhesitatingly  be  called  scenery.  Far  below  lay  a  vast,  rolling,  heav- 
ily wooded,  almost  mountainous  world,  little  white  towns  here  and 
there  contrasting  with  the  distance-blue  of  the  greenness,  while  farther 
off  faintly  seen  lagoons  were  backed  by  other  densely  blue-black  hills. 

Suddenly  the  stream  we  had  been  following  dropped  headlong  down 
a  great  face  of  rock  at  a  speed  we  dared  not  follow,  breaking  itself  into 


154  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

white  cascades  that  repeated  themselves  a  score  of  times  before  it  disap- 
peared in  the  chartless  wilderness.  The  train  crawled  cautiously  along 
the  edge  of  precipices,  circling  slowly  in  vast  curves  in  and  out  cf  the 
wooded  mountain  that  grew  ever  higher  above  us.  Through  tunnels 
and  rock-cuttings,  across  viaducts  and  lofty  iron  bridges,  around  con- 
stricted loops  where  the  train  seemed  to  be  pursuing  its  own  tail,  like  a 
frolicsome  puppy,  along  stone-faced  bottomless  precipices  we  pursued 
our  descent,  with  the  infinite  caution  of  extremely  old  peop:e.  A  soft- 
ness crept  into  the  breeze;  the  feminine  breath  of  the  tropics  caressed 
our  cheeks;  the  intense  respiration  of  the  jungle  took  to  droning  in  our 
ears.  The  vast,  blue,  wooded  world  far  below,  with  its  white  towns, 
its  mirroring  lagoons,  its  mysterious  hazy  recesses,  gradually  yet  im- 
perceptibly climbed  to  meet  lis,  while  the  breakneck  cliffs  grew  up 
beside  us  into  sheer  walls  that  seemed  utterly  unscalable.  It  surely 
needed  a  man  of  vision  to  stare  up  at  that  precipitous  mountainside 
and  decide  that  he  could  climb  it  with  a  railroad. 

The  short  but  decided  descent  of  three  thousand  feet  ended  at  length 
in  the  somber,  velvety  valleys  of  Paranagua,  and  the  train  calmed  down 
from  its  nervous  tension  into  a  mood  more  in  keeping  with  the  in- 
dolent, tropical-wooded,  sea-level  world.  It  had  suddenly  become 
stickily  warm.  Clothing  that  had  often  felt  too  thin  on  the  plateau  above 
grew  incredibly  heavy,  and  as  final  proof  that  we  had  entered  the  real 
tropics  there  fell  upon  us  a  sudden  languid  indifference  to  progress, 
and  w'e  loitered  about  each  station  doing  nothing  for  an  unconscionable 
length  of  time.  Old  women  and  boys,  dressed  in  a  few  odd  scraps  of 
garments  wandered  about  with  baskets  of  oranges,  tangerines,  and 
bananas,  but  acted  as  if  it  were  not  of  the  slightest  importance  to  them 
whether  the  stuff'  Vv^as  sold  or  not,  as  the  baby  did  not  need  a  new  pair 
of  shoes  anyway  and  it  would  be  much  less  of  a  bore  if  scliool  did  not 
keep  at  all.  What  a  different  philosophy  of  life  the  tropics  bring  even 
to  the  man  from  temperate  climes,  and  how  quickly !  Up  on  the 
plateau  I  had  become  almost  gloomy  over  a  hole  that  had  begun  to 
appear  in  the  sole  of  a  shoe ;  down  here  It  seemed  of  so  slight  impor- 
tance that  all  memory  of  it  quickly  drifted  out  of  my  mind.  There 
came  a  sunset  like  a  dozen  pots  of  assorted  paints  kicked  over  by  a 
mule,  and  dense,  humid,  tropical  night  settled  swiftly  down  upon  us  like 
an  impenetrable  pall. 

Paranagua,  a  typical  tropical  seaport,  is  not  on  the  sea  at  all  but 
on  the  narrow  neck  of  one  of  those  many  lagoons  stretching  along  the 
coast  of  southern  Brazil,     k'or  some  time  I  wandered  about  town, 


BUMPING  UP  TO  RIO  155 

barely  able  to  see  the  next  footstep  before  me  in  the  clinging,  crape-like 
darkness.  I  had  a  letter  to  a  once  well-known  New  York  newspaper 
correspondent  who  had  reformed  and  gone  to  raising  bananas,  but  lie 
was  not  in  town,  and  though  I  talked  with  him  by  telephone  I  did  not 
deliver  the  missive.  For  it  would  have  required  twenty-four  hours 
of  travel  by  launch,  canoe,  and  ox-cart  to  reach  the  plantation  where  he 
was  holding  open  house  for  the  vice  ])resident  of  the  state  and  other 
solemnities,  my  evening  clothes  had  long  since  been  misplaced  and  .  .  . 
and  anyway  what's  the  use  of  doing  anything  in  the  tropics?  It  is  so 
much  easier  to  let  things  drift  along  until  it  is  too  late.  Finally,  in  the 
back  room  of  a  cafe,  I  ran  across  several  American  residents  engaged 
in  the  universal  tropical  pastime  of  mixing  whiskey  with  soda  water. 
One  of  them  headed  the  electric  light  and  bathtub  syndicate  of 
Paranagua,  neither  of  which  improvements  on  primitive  society  seemed 
to  require  his  exclusive  attention,  for  he  had  time  to  cultivate  genuine 
hospitality.  Aluch  talk,  whiskev,  soda,  and  local  beer  had  been  con- 
sumed, however,  before  I  managed  to  get  in  a  hint  containing  the  word 
food.  The  Americans  led  me  to  the  thoroughly  tropical  establishment 
of  a  "Turk"  who  had  once  graced  the  United  States  with  his  presence 
and  who  had  there  learned  to  concoct  real  ham  and  eggs — with  the 
slight  exception  of  not  soaking  the  salt  out  of  the  ham  and  of  frying 
the  eggs  to  a  frazzle.  Here  the  consumption  of  words  continued  until 
it  was  discovered  that  all  the  hotels,  which  were  unspeakable  places 
anyway,  had  closed,  and  that  I  would  do  much  better  to  put  up  wdth 
the  hospitable  bathtub  man.  We  waded  through  the  dense  humid 
night,  not  to  mention  many  acres  of  loose  sand  and  veritable  streams  of 
dew,  to  the  outskirts  of  the  sand-and-woods  scattered  town,  where  I 
was  soon  introduced  to  an  enormous  double  bed  in  the  plantation  house 
of  slave  days  which  my  fellow-countryman  was  guarding  for  the 
absentee  owner. 

Seen  by  daylight,  Paranagua  has  a  very  ancient  stone  customhouse, 
now  a  barracks  and  once  a  Jesuit  monastery,  with  the  customary  tra- 
dition of  an  underground  passage  from  it  to  an  island  a  few  miles  out 
in  the  shallow  lagoon.  There  was  one  statue  in  town,  a  bronze  bust 
among  magnificent  royal  palm-trees  of  "our  dear  Professor  Sulano, 
who  taught  us  all  we  know  and  died  in  1904,  erected  by  his  grateful 
pupils."  My  own  memory  is  treacherous,  but  will  some  bright  pupil 
kindly  name  the  American  cities  which  have  busts  of  the  high  school 
principal  in  front  of  the  municipal  group?  Dugout  canoes  full  of 
oranges  were  drawn  up  on  the  beach,  and  fish  of  every  imaginable  size, 


156  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

shape,  and  variety  were  offered  for  sale.  The  population  was  of  that 
mongrel  sort  that  I  was  due  to  find  throughout  Brazil  wherever  Euro- 
pean colonists  have  not  appeared  in  any  great  number.  It  was  not  until 
ten  that  the  sun  had  drunk  up  the  vast  banks  of  cheese-thick  mists 
that  hang  often  over  this  corner  of  the  world,  and  then  the  humidity 
remained  to  help  the  despotic  red  sun  that  burst  upon  us  emphasize 
the  advantage  of  a  bathing-suit  over  customary  garb.  Yet  even  the 
American  residents  insisted  on  wearing  full  Broadway  dress  of  heavy 
black  suits  with  vests,  topped  with  derbies !  To  appear  in  less,  they 
explained,  would  be  to  disgrace  their  native  land  and  to  lose  all  dignity 
in  the  eyes  of  the  natives,  though  such  garb  was  probably  one  of  the 
reasons  why  they  seemed  so  lifeless  and  could  vmder  no  provocation 
be  enticed  into  the  crushing  sunshine. 

By  mid-afternoon  the  train  began  to  v/ind  itself  back  up  to  the 
Brazilian  plateau,  the  air  taking  on  a  refreshing  coolness  the  moment 
we  began  to  climb.  Next  morning,  when  I  was  pulled  out  of  bed  in 
Curityba  in  time  to  catch  the  5  130  train  back  to  the  main  line,  on  which 
a  broken  nap  in  an  uncomfortable  seat  was  chiefly  dreams  about  ice- 
bergs, I  would  have  given  anything  within  reason  for  one  of  those 
scorned  hours  in  Paranagua.  At  every  station  where  we  stopped  for 
more  than  an  instant  all  passengers  tumbled  off  to  partake  of  coffee. 
For  a  woman  or  man  of  the  vicinity  was  sure  to  have  a  table  in  the 
shade  of  the  station,  with  many  little  white  cups  that  were  filled  with 
thick  black  coft"ee  as  the  travelers  deluged  upon  them.  The  Brazilian 
who  is  not  permitted  to  drop  off  at  least  once  an  hour  and  drink  from 
one  to  four  such  cups  at  a  tostao  (a  hundred  reis)  each,  and  rush  back 
to  the  train  again  as  the  warning  bell  rings,  would  feel  that  he  was 
being  cheated  of  his  birthright. 

j\Iy  next  stop  was  at  a  houseless  siding  just  south  of  the  boundary 
line  of  Sao  Paulo  state.  Here  is  the  "Fazenda  Morongava,"  where  the 
railway  and  its  attendant  corporation  runs  a  model  ranch  in  charge  of 
a  Texas  Scotchman,  a  central  point  of  the  ten  million  acres  it  owns  in 
Brazil  and  Bolivia.  An  official  telegram  had  ordered  the  conductor  to 
set  me  down  there,  when  I  discovered  that  the  private  car  hitched  on 
behind  us  was  filled  with  guests  of  the  company,  and  was  due  to  be 
sidetracked  at  the  same  spot.  It  was  after  midnight  that  I  awoke  to 
hear  the  porter  carrying  out  his  instructions  to  tell  the  switchman  to 
show  me  up  to  the  fasenda  buildings,  more  than  a  mile  away  over 
rocky  hills— and  to  note  with  dismay  that  my  newly  appointed  guide 
had  a  wooden  leg!     But  a  huge  form  loomed  up  out  of  the  brightly 


BUMPING  UP  TO  RIO 


^:)/ 


njoonlighted  night  and  I  was  soon  rolling  away  over  the  hills  with  a 
Colorado  cattleman  in  a  two-wheeled  gig  toward  a  huge  farmhouse 
built  half  a  century  ago  in  slave  times  and  now  surrounded  by  several 
other  and  more  modern  buildings. 

The  private-car  party  was  already  scattered  over  the  landscape  from 
breakfast-room  to  champion-pig  sty  when  I  awoke,  to  be  at  once  in- 
vited to  wage  battle  with  a  genuine  American  breakfast  ranging  all  th  ■ 
way  from  honest-to-goodness  bacon,  made  on  the  faccnda,  but  un- 
known in  Brazil  at  large,  down  to  hot  cakes.  Unfortunately  I  had  so 
long  before  lost  both  the  habit  and  the  opportunity  of  battling  with 
American  breakfasts  that  I  was  quickly  floored,  in  spite  of  being 
cheered  on  by  the  genuine  American  housewife  in  charge.  But  my 
lack  of  endurance  was  fully  made  up  for  by  the  last  of  the  private-car 
party  to  leave  the  table,  a  man  who  had  been  sent  down  by  a  Chicago 
packing-house  to  start  a  similar  establishment  in  Sao  Paulo.  In  all 
my  travels  I  have  never  met  his  equal  at  mixing  the  flesh  of  "hawgs" 
with  eggs  and  hot  biscuits  and  butter  and  coffee  and  hot  cakes,  whether 
the  feat  be  considered  from  the  point  of  view  of  quantity  or  speed. 
During  his  championship  exhibition  he  bemoaned  the  fact  that,  though 
he  was  barely  forty,  he  had  suffered  greatly  in  walking  up  the  hill 
from  the  car  that  morning,  and  for  the  life  of  him  he  could  not  under- 
stand how  he  had  become  so  fat,  since  as  a  farm  boy  twenty  years 
before  he  had  been  "lean  as  a  rail." 

In  addition  to  this  exhibit  our  "house  party"  included  a  French 
chairman  of  the  board  of  directors  of  the  railways  of  southern  Brazil, 
who  had  run  over  for  nine  days  to  learn  all  about  them  before  going  to 
Persia  on  a  similar  mission.  Besides  his  staff,  several  uncatalogued 
hangers-on,  and  the  family  of  the  manager,  there  was  the  American 
ranch  personnel,  ranging  from  the  fat  and  jolly  fazenda  doctor  who 
drove  constantly  about  the  estate  in  a  sulky  behind  racing  mules,  to  a 
score  of  boss  cowboys  who  shocked  the  Europeans  and  Brazilians  by 
addressing  everyone,  be  he  manager,  packing-house  expert,  or  chair- 
man of  the  board  of  directors,  in  exactly  the  same  manner, — "What, 
ain't  you  fellers  been  down  to  the  barn  yet  ?  Y'  ought  'a  shake  a  leg  an' 
see  them  there  new  heifers  we  jes'  got  in,"  Now  and  then  we  caught 
a  fleeting  glimpse  of  the  real  servant  body,  the  native  laborers,  cattle 
herders,  and  gauchos,  who  "knew  their  place"  in  the  European-Bra 
zilian  sense  and  \\hom  the  manager  had  cured  of  the  time-honorea 
custom  of  alternating  three  working  days  a  week  with  four  days  of 
drunken  festivity  by  "firing"  on  a  moment's  notice  and  establishing  the 


158  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

fixed  rule  that  "if  there's  to  be  any  dhrinkin'  on  this  ranch,  I  '11  do  it 
mvself."  The  peons  and  native  cowboys  were  paid  from  fifty  to  a 
hundred  thousand  reis  a  month,  and  "found,"  and  with  local  prohibi- 
tion in  force  and  gambling  scowled  upon — to  their  mind  inexplicable 
"gringo"  idiosyncrasies — they  were  often  hard  put  to  h  to  get  rid  of 
their  money. 

Not  being  overwhelmingly  interested  in  "hawgs,"  I  accepted  the  in- 
vitation of  a  boss  cow-boy  and  rode  nearly  all  day  among  the  hillside 
pastures.  The  degenerate  tropical  animal  under  it  was  not  exactly  my 
idea  of  the  noun  equus,  but  the  Texas  saddle  was  all  a  saddle  should  be, 
and  a  great  improvement  on  others  I  had  bestridden  in  South  America. 
The  cattle  included  crosses  between  native  cows  and  zebu  bulls,  whicli 
had  turned  out  lanky  and  of  poor  butcher's  quality,  though  they  with- 
stood the  heat  and  ticks  better  than  pedigree  stock.  We  saw  several 
fleet  deer,  visited  a  great  canyon  with  a  waterfall,  the  striking  of  which 
on  a  ledge  of  rock  hundreds  of  feet  below  gave  an  intermittent  sound 
like  that  of  a  compound  engine  puffing  up  a  stiff  grade,  and  had  a 
native  dinner,  at  an  isolated  American  cowboy's  shack,  of  rice,  black 
beans,  and  farinha  (a  coarse  meal  made  of  ground  mandioca,  used  to 
stiffen  soups  or  eaten  dry  all  over  Brazil),  topped  off  by  coffee  and 
hot  biscuits.  Magnificent  panoramas  rolling  away  into  blue  distances 
opened  out  as  we  jogged  up  and  down  over  the  great  folds  of  earth. 
Though  it  was  midwinter,  it  was  so  only  in  name,  and  the  climate 
could  scarcely  have  been  improved  upon.  The  hottest  that  had  ever 
been  recorded  here  was  84  degrees,  and  70  was  the  lowest  of  a  winter 
day,  while  the  fresh  cool  nights  required  a  blanket  the  year  round. 

The  Americans,  from  the  manager  down,  were  agreed  that  all  the 
land  of  southern  Brazil  was  of  excellent  fertility.  It  was  better  where 
there  was  timber,  but  the  campo,  which  the  natives  will  not  try  to 
cultivate  because  it  does  not  yield  immediate  results,  will  also  produce 
in  abundance  almost  any  temperate  or  semi-tropical  crop,  if  it  is  worked 
a  year  or  two  to  let  the  air  into  it  and  is  sufficiently  manured  to  offset 
the  two  per  cent,  of  iron  which  makes  the  soil  so  red.  Not  the  least 
of  the  advantages  over  the  floor-flat  pampas,  from  the  grazier's  point 
of  view,  was  the  rolling  character  of  the  ground.  With  hollows  and 
ravines  there  were  no  floods,  yet  always  water,  so  that  the  cattle  did 
not  wear  themselves  out  in  the  dry  season  by  wandering  in  search  of  it. 
Thousands  of  head  of  stock  were  born,  raised,  and  driven  to  slaughter 
in  the  same  hollow,  the  country  being  often  not  even  wire-fenced.  All 
were  enthusiastic  over  southern  Brazil  as  a  land  of  promise  for  white 


BUMPING  UP  TO  RIO  159 

colonists  with  youth,  heahh,  a  httle  patience,  who  were  willing  to  earn 
their  livini^  from  the  soil  instead  of  "sponging"  on  others,  after  the 
fashion  of  the  natives ;  and  all  considered  the  Argentine  overestimated, 
just  now  in  the  limelight,  but  with  no  such  great  future  before  it  as 
southern  Brazil. 

I  continued  my  journey  in  the  private-car  of  my  fellow-guests,  which 
was  picked  up  by  the  tri-weekly  train  some  time  during  the  second 
night.  When  the  sun  again  rose  above  the  horizon,  we  found  ourselves 
in  the  richest  and  most  famous  state  of  Brazil,  the  cofTce-growing 
land  of  Sao  Paulo.  Our  coach  had  been  hooked  on  directly  behind  the 
engine,  ahead  of  the  baggage-car,  so  that  we  had  to  get  off  to  reach  the 
dining-car — whereby  hangs  a  tale.  The  "hawg"  man  and  I  reached 
there  together,  without  his  interpreter,  whose  place  I  had  to  take  and 
explain  at  great  length  why  any  man,  least  of  all  one  whose  facade 
quaked  as  he  walked,  could  not  be  satisfied  with  small  cakes  and  coffee, 
like  reasonable  human  beings,  instead  of  demanding  eggs  and  toucinho 
— which  means  bacon  in  a  Portuguese  dictionary  but  salt  pork  in  a 
Brazilian  mind — and  getting  into  a  rage  because  there  was  none  of  the 
latter  on  board  and  commanding  a  large  steak  in  its  place.  Then,  as 
if  that  were  not  trouble  enough,  my  famished  ward  proved  himself  a 
poor  traveler  in  Brazil  by  complaining  vociferously  just  because  one 
poor  little  fly  got  cooked  with  his  eggs.  It  may  have  been  my  fault, 
too;  for  I  had  not  yet  grown  accustomed  to  the  Spanish  letter  "1'  be- 
coming an  "r"  in  Portuguese,  and  no  doubt,  speaking  with  a  Castilian 
accent,  I  inadvertently  ordered  flied  eggs. 

Sorocaba  was  the  largest  town  of  the  day's  journey,  and  with  it  the 
cruder  rural  section,  the  rude  wooden  houses  of  new  colonists,  and 
the  parasol  pine-trees  largely  disappeared,  while  palms  increased.  No- 
where from  Montevideo  northward  had  I  seen  an  acre  of  sterile  land, 
though  certainly  not  one-tenth  of  what  I  had  seen  was  under  cultiva- 
tion. On  a  pole  before  each  house  now  was  a  white  banner  with  the 
likeness  of  a  saint,  which  had  hung  there  since  St.  Peter's  Day  a  fort- 
night before.  The  railroad  made  a  complete  circle  around  Sao  Roque 
in  its  deep  lap  of  hills,  and  gradually,  in  mid-afternoon,  there  grew  up 
a  constant  succession  of  villages.  We  passed  groups  of  unquestionably 
city  people,  and  presently  Sao  Paulo  itself  burst  upon  us,  far  away  and 
strewn  up  along,  over,  and  about  a  dry  and  treeless  ridge.  Then  it 
disappeared  again  for  quite  a  time,  while  the  villages  changed  to  urban 
scenes,  streets  began  to  take  on  names,  electric-cars  to  spin  along  beside 
us,  endless  lines  of  hght-colored  houses  of  concrete  with  red-tile  roofs 


i6o  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

appeared,  and  at  last  we  came  to  a  halt  in  a  great  glass-vaulted  modern 
station  in  the  second  city  of  Brazil — second,  that  is,  in  population,  for  it 
is  first  in  energy  and  industry,  capital  of  the  most  progressive  state  of 
the  union  and  the  first  real  city  on  the  main  hne  north  of  Montevideo. 

Swinging  my  trunk  under  one  arm,  I  set  out  to  find  a  lodging  in 
keeping  with  my  sadly  depleted  pocketbook.  The  first  part  of  that 
task  was  in  no  way  difficult.  Of  all  the  cities  of  the  earth,  as  far  as  I 
know  it,  perhaps  only  Paris  has  more  hotels,  pensocs,  and  lodging- 
houses  per  capita  than  Sao  Paulo.  There  seemed  to  be  at  least  one 
for  every  half-dozen  possible  guests.  In  all  but  the  best  of  them  there 
were  two  or  more  beds  in  each  room,  as  if  they  some  day  expected  to 
have  a  veritable  flood  of  clients;  but  this  prospective  congestion  mat- 
tered little,  for  they  rarely  had  anyone  to  share  the  room,  though  they 
doubled  the  bill  if  one  asked  to  have  a  room  alone.  When  it  came  to 
considering  these  accommodations  on  the  score  of  cost,  however,  the 
task  of  a  man  with  a  flattened  pocketbook  was  serious,  for  the  prices 
in  the  poorest  "doss-house"  were  appalling.  Democracy  and  popular 
education,  even  their  pale  reflections,  seem  to  bring  with  them  the  cult 
of  the  white  collar,  which  grows  more  fervent  as  one  approaches  th^ 
equator;  hence  scores  of  muscular  Spanish  and  Portuguese  immi- 
grants had  opened  hotels  in  Sao  Paulo  who  should  have  been  out  plant- 
ing corn  or  hoeing  coffee.  Competition  is  not  always  a  benefit.  The 
hotels  of  Sao  Paulo  were  atrocious  in  price  and  poor  in  quality  pre- 
cisely because  there  was  so  much  competition,  scores  of  hotel-keepers, 
each  with  runners,  touts,  and  a  host  of  hangers-on,  trying  to  make  a 
fortune  in  six  months  out  of  the  three  or  four  guests  a  week  which 
fate  sent  them,  that  they  might  return  to  end  their  days  at  ease  in  the 
land  of  their  birth.  For  it  was  not  the  native  Paulistas  who  ran  the 
countless  hostleries  of  all  classes,  but  easy-fortune  seekers  from  over- 
seas. 

The  English  writer  Southey,  who  wrote  a  six-volume  history  of 
Brazil,  complained  of  the  "tremendous  ascents"  and  the  thinness  of  the 
air  on  the  plateau  of  Sao  Paulo— with  its  elevation  of  nearly  2,500 
feet !  Certainly  the  man  who  has  rambled  about  the  Andes  feels  only 
gratitude  for  that  altitude,  which  lifts  him  above  the  sweltering  heat 
of  the  coastlands.  Even  to  the  casual  observer,  however,  there  seems 
no  other  fitting  reason  for  founding  a  city  at  this  particular  spot,  and 
one  is  quickly  driven  to  printed  authority  to  account  for  such  taste. 
In  1554  the  Jesuit,  Jose  de  Anchietta,  had  gone  to  the  town  of  Pirati- 
nanga  to  estabhsh  a  school,  but  being  dissatisfied  with  that  village,  he 


BUxMPING  UP  TO  RIO  16 1 

ordered  its  inhabitants,  in  the  doj^'^matic  Jesuit  manner  of  those  good 
old  days,  to  remove  to  a  site  on  the  Tiete.  Now  the  Tiete  is  scarcely  a 
brook,  rising  on  the  Brazilian  plateau  near  the  Atlantic  and  flowing 
away  across  country  to  the  Parana,  finally  to  join  the  Plata  and  pour 
its  scanty  waters  into  the  South  Atlantic.  There  are  a  dozen  real  rivers 
to  the  north  and  south  of  this  insignificant  stream  and  a  hundred  sites 
that  would  have  seemed  better  suited  to  the  good  padre's  purpose,  but 
the  Jesuit  insisted  and  at  length  the  people  of  Piratinanga  obeyed  his 
command ;  and  because  the  town  that  was  destined  to  grow  to  be  the 
industrial  capital  and  the  railway  center  of  Brazil  was  founded  on 
June  25,  it  was  named  St.  Paul  in  honor  of  that  day's  saint. 

One  must  get  some  little  way  out  of  Sao  Paulo  to  appreciate  its 
situation  clearly.  Built  on  plump  low  hills  in  a  rolling,  treeless  coun- 
try, rather  dry  and  reddish  of  soil,  the  nature  of  the  ground  gives 
splendid  views  of  the  town  from  many  points  of  vantage,  and  in 
tramping  about  its  environs  one  finds  every  now  and  then  the  reddish, 
light-colortd  city  spread  out  in  almost  its  entirety  below  or  above  him. 
In  a  general  sense  the  city  and  the  region  about  it  would  be  called  flat, 
yet  in  detail  it  is  by  no  means  so.  The  character  of  its  site  gives  Sao 
Paulo  an  intricate  network  of  streets,  with  viaducts  over  great  gullies 
and  street-cars  passing  above  and  under  one  another.  The  great  Ma- 
ducto  do  Cha  stands  so  high  above  the  great  ravine  through  the  center 
of  town  that  it  is  a  favorite  place  of  threatened  suicide  among  love- 
sick youths. 

Its  unexpected  position  as  capital  and  metropolis  of  the  world's 
greatest  coffee-producing  state  has  given  this  once  bucolic  country 
town  so  extraordinary  a  growth  that  the  Cidade  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury is  now  merely  the  central  tangle  of  streets  in  the  heart  of  town. 
From  this  nucleus  run  splendid  avenues  lined  with  a  bushy  species  of 
shade-trees,  and  residence  sections  with  dwellings  of  coffee  kings, 
ranging  all  the  way  from  sumptuous  comfort  to  magnificent  and  palatial 
eyesores,  spread  away  across  town  in  various  directions.  Sao  Paulo 
has  more  than  half  a  million  inhabitants,  a  municipal  theater  for  opera, 
drama,  and  concerts  scarcely  second  to  any  in  the  western  hemisphere, 
and  an  up-and-coming  manner  which  quickly  establishes  its  claim  to 
equality  with  modern  cities  of  the  temperate  zone.  The  "Light  and 
Power  Company"  runs  an  excellent  service  of  open  street-cars  and 
gives  the  city  a  nightly  brilliancy  that  is  not  often  reached  in  cities  of 
its  size.  Its  immaculate  policemen  carry  speckless  white  clubs,  thrust 
into  leather  scabbards  except  when  directing  traffic.     No  one  has  ever 


i62  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

known  them  to  strike  a  man  with  a  ckib,  but  they  are  at  least  awe- 
inspiring  representatives  of  law  and  order. 

The  extraordinary  activity  of  Sao  Paulo  is  plainly  due  to  its  Euro- 
pean immigrants, — Portuguese,  Spanish,  especially  Italian.  Whether 
it  is  because  they  come  from  the  northern  part  of  the  peninsula,  where 
sterner  characters  grow,  or  that  they  feel  pecuHarly  at  home  in  the 
Brazilian  environment,  the  Italians  of  Sao  Paulo  stand  noticeably  high 
in  the  community.  Many  of  the  important  business  houses,  some  of 
the  professions,  and  much  of  the  wealth  is  in  their  hands ;  among  the 
rather  insignificant-looking  hybrid  Brazilians  they  are  conspicuous  for 
their  better  physique  and  greater  energy.  Modern  and  energetic 
though  it  is,  however,  Sao  Paulo  swarms  with  non-producers.  At  the 
stations  crowds  of  able-bodied  carregadorcs,  paying  a  high  municipal 
license  and  waiting  most  of  the  day  in  vain  for  an  errand,  try  to 
recoup  themselves  by  demanding  a  thousand  reis  or  more  for  carrying 
the  traveler's  bag  across  the  street.  The  city  has  so  many  shops  and 
hawkers  and  peddlers  that  one  might  easily  fancy  it  in  a  densely  popu- 
lated country,  rather  than  in  one  where  land  is  everywhere  suffering 
for  cultivation.  Countless  little  liquor  shops  are  run  by  grasping  in- 
dividuals without  initiative,  anyone  with  cash  or  credit  enough  to  buy  a 
dozen  bottles  of  liquor  seeming  to  choose  this  high  road  to  opulence. 
Vendors  of  tickets  for  both  the  national  and  state  lotteries  make  day 
and  night  hideous  with  their  uproar  and  crowd  the  principal  streets 
with  their  booths ;  hordes  of  silk-clad,  bejeweled  French  and  Jewish 
adventuresses  roll  luxuriantly  to  and  fro  every  afternoon  in  their 
automobiles. 

The  principal  place  of  meeting  for  the  rank  and  file  is  the  Jardim  da 
Liis,  a  "popular"  park  retreat  of  the  German  beer-garden  style,  well 
crowded  of  an  evening,  especially  when  a  municipal  or  military  band 
plays.  Here,  too,  vendors  of  strong  and  weak  drink  are  ubiquitous, 
their  tables  in  the  open  air,  their  prices  posted  on  the  trees,  yet  demand- 
ing 500  reis  for  a  glass  of  sweetened  water,  with  the  waiter  still  to  hz 
satisfied.  Everyone  moves  with  an  almost  tropical  leisure,  though  there 
are  evenings  in  this  July  midwinter  when  autumn  garments  are  not  out 
of  place  and  not  a  few  young  fops  afifect  overcoats.  Yet  Sao  Paulo  is, 
on  the  whole,  a  less  showy  town  than  one  expects.  Foreigners  are  so 
usual  in  any  gathering  that  one  attracts  little  notice.  Though  perhaps  a 
majority  of  such  a  "popular"  crowd  is  of  the  physically  insignificant, 
negroid  mixture  common  to  much  of  Brazil,  in  the  strolling  throng 
may  be  seen  every  nationality  from  tow-headed  Norwegian   girls — 


BUMPING  UP  TO  RIO  163 

about  whom  there  are  suggestions  of  the  effects  of  a  tropical  climate 
and  environment  in  slackening  social  morals  among  any  race — to  a 
Japanese  out  on  the  edge  of  the  night,  witli  a  far-away-across-the-Pa- 
cific  look  in  his  cynical-inscrutable  eyes  out  of  all  keeping  with  his 
commonplace  "European"  garb. 

Every  stroll  beyond  the  city  limits  well  repaid  the  dusty  exertion. 
Evidently  the  year's  shipment  of  rain,  like  so  many  carelessly  billed 
supplies  from  the  North,  had  been  carried  past  its  destination,  for  the 
region  about  Sao  Paulo  was  deadly  dry  at  a  season  when  it  should  have 
been  verdant,  and  the  newspapers  reported  the  churches  of  Buenos 
Aires  filled  day  and  night  with  people  praying  that  the  celestial  water- 
works might  be  shut  off.  The  cloud  effects  on  the  Brazilian  plateau 
are  so  striking  that  Sao  Paulo  was  perhaps  more  beautiful  on  a  gray 
day  than  on  a  bright  one  when  the  glare  brought  out  something  of 
squalor.  Out  at  Ypiranga  on  the  bank  of  a  tiny  stream,  where  Em- 
peror Pedro  I  gave  the  "cry  of  independence"  that  eventually  shook 
Brazil  free  from  Portugal,  there  is  a  remarkably  good  museum  full  of 
a  wealth  of  historical  material, — mementoes  of  the  aboriginal  inhabi- 
tants, splendid  collections  of  the  fauna  of  Brazil,  hundreds  of  borbo- 
letas,  or  butterflies,  of  which  the  country  has  an  incredible  variety  in 
size  and  color,  innumerable  species  of  beija-Horcs  ("kiss-flowers,"  or 
humming-birds),  many  pica-paos  ("pick-sticks,"  which  are  none  other 
than  woodpeckers)  ;  strange  specimens  of  the  vulture  family  known 
as  Joao  Velho  ("Old  John"). 

Or  the  five-mile  tramp  out  to  Penha  is  no  waste  of  time.  The  road 
passes  through  many  market  gardens  of  black  soil  in  the  bottomlands. 
Along  the  way  are  Italian  husbandmen  with  wide  heavy  mattocks, 
Sicilian  stocking-caps  like  the  chorus  of  "Cavalleria  Rusticana"  on 
their  heads,  Egyptian  water-dips  on  poles  with  American  oil-cans  as 
buckets,  Gallego  ox-carts  with  solid  wooden  wheels  and  axles  that 
shriek  along  the  highway,  much  cabbage  and  lettuce,  a  few  potatoes, 
grapes,  baskets  of  strawberries  almost  the  year  round.  Pack-mules 
and  the  raucous  cry  of  muleteers  plodding  soft-footed  in  the  dust 
behind  them,  one  person  to  each  milk-can  of  a  gallon  or  two.  carrying 
it  on  his  head  to  town,  there  to  sell  it  by  the  cupful — no  wonder  milk 
costs  its  weight  in  silver — and  much  more  may  be  seen  spread  out 
across  the  reddish  landscape  bounded  by  the  low  rol'ing  hills,  lieht- 
wooded  in  places  and  distance-blue  in  color,  of  the  coast  ransre.  The 
town  of  Penha  is  pitched  on  the  summit  of  a  knoll  with  a  striking  view 
of  Sao  Paulo,  five  miles  away,  and  a  shrine  to  which  the  oious  flock 


i64  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA     • 

in  great  numbers.  Inside  the  otherwise  uninteresting  church  is  an 
ornate  Virgin  who  is  credited  with  miraculous  cures,  and  her  chamber 
overflows  with  evidences  of  gratitude  from  her  devotees, — hundreds 
of  pictures  by  native  "artists,"  atrocious  photographs  of  accidents 
posed  for  after  they  had  taken  place,  that  the  miraculously  rescued 
victim  might  carry  out  the  promise  made  in  the  heat  of  fear  to  the 
Virgin,  the  latter  always  represented  somewhere  in  the  upper  right- 
hand  corner  of  the  picture  in  the  act  of  saving  the  devotee  from 
appalling  sudden  death  in  the  very  nick  of  time.  Here  a  fat  man  is 
being  snatched  from  beneath  the  wheels  of  a  heavy  truck,  there  a  baby 
is  shown  safely  deposited  on  the  fender  of  a  street-car,  or  a  country- 
man falling  from  his  horse  is  landing  upright  with  divine  assistance. 
Far  more  numerous  than  these  pictorial  atrocities,  however,  are  the 
wax  imitations  of  all  parts  of  the  body.  A  sign  on  the  wall  announced 
that  "only  things  that  are  decent  may  be  shown  in  the  miracle  room," 
but  words  have  not  the  same  meanings  in  different  climes  and  races,  and 
little  was  left  to  the  imagination,  though  no  doubt  the  rule  cuts  down 
appreciably  the  material  evidences  of  cures.  How  widespread  is 
superstition  and  the  fostering  of  it  even  in  the  progressive  state  of  Sao 
Paulo  is  shown  by  the  fact  that  a  month  fills  the  room  to  oyerflowing. 
During  the  few  minutes  I  was  there  a  man  brought  a  wax  foot,  a 
buxom  young  woman  a  breast,  and  a  mulatto  crone  a  hand  which  no 
doubt  was  meant  to  represent  one  of  her  own,  though  it  was  snow- 
white  except  where  she  had  painted  a  red  streak  across  the  back  to 
indicate  the  portion  she  wished,  or  had  already  had,  cured.  But  the 
Virgin  of  Penha  draws  no  color-line,  for  her  own  complexion  is  by  no 
means  strictly  Caucasian,  and  her  quadroon  swarthiness  no  doubt  gives 
the  average  of  her  devotees  a  comfortable  feeling  of  racial  propinquity. 
Most  famous,  perhaps,  of  all  the  sights  in  and  about  Sao  Paulo  is  the 
"Instituto  Butantan,"  known  among  the  English-speaking  residents  as 
the  "snake  farm."  A  mile  walk  out  beyond  the  Pinheiros  car-line 
brings  one  to  this  important  and  well-conducted  establishment,  first 
started  by  private  initiative  but  now  receiving  government  aid.  On 
the  crest  of  a  knoll  are  several  concrete  buildings  and  about  them 
scores  of  snake-houses,  half-spherical  cement  structures  some  four 
feet  high  inclosed  in  sections  by  low  walls  and  moats,  where  thousands 
of  snakes  lie  basking  in  the  sun.  By  Brazilian  law  any  public  carrier 
must  transport  free  of  charge  from  its  place  of  capture  to  the  "snake 
farm"  of  Sao  Paulo  any  new  species  of  snake  discovered.  There  are 
one  hundred  and  eighty  known  species  of  reptile  in  Brazil — ^the  Portu- 


BUMPING  UP  TO  RIO  165 

guese  word  for  snake,  by  the  way,  is  cobra — of  which  ten  are  known 
to  be  venomous;  in  other  words  when  a  snake  appears  even  in  Brazil 
there  is  only  one  chance  in  eighteen  that  his  bite  is  harmful,  and  the 
odds  are  eighteen  to  one  that  he  is  just  a  harmless  feilow  who  wants 
to  cuddle  up  in  your  lap  for  company.  But  the  venomous  ones  are 
venomous  indeed.  There  is  the  deadly  cascavel,  or  rattlesnake,  the 
jararaca,  worst  of  all  the  jararaca  de  rabo  branco,  the  jararaca  with  a 
white  tail.  Aside  from  its  mere  museum  or  "zoo"  function,  the  "Insti- 
tuto  Butantan"  has  two  very  practical  purposes.  Three  serums  are 
made  here  for  snakebites  and  sent  to  all  parts  of  the  republic,  remedies 
that  have  saved  the  life  of  many  a  sertanejo  dwelling  in  wilderness 
isolation  back  in  the  scrtoes  of  Brazil,  where  an  ignorant  pill-peddler, 
who  calls  himself  "doiitor,"  but  whose  training  as  a  physician  is  largely 
imaginary,  sometimes  appears  not  more  than  once  or  twice  a  year. 
The  venomous  snakes  are  required  to  furnish  their  own  antidote.  A 
uniformed  negro  attendant  springs  over  the  low  wall  and  moat  into  an 
inclosure  of  dangerous  snakes,  pins  one  to  the  ground  with  a  sort  of 
iron  cane,  picks  it  up  by  the  throat  with  his  bare  hands,  and  forces  it  to 
spit  its  yellowish  venom  into  a  piece  of  cheesecloth  drawn  tight  over 
the  opening  of  a  glass  receptacle.  Healthy  young  mules  are  inoculated 
with  this,  and  the  scrum  produced  in  much  the  same  w-ay  as  smallpox 
vaccine. 

The  second  purpose  of  the  institute  is  to  breed  and  distribute  the 
fintssiirama.  This  is  a  native  black  snake  sometimes  reaching  eight 
feet  in  length,  entirely  harmless  to  man  but  which  feeds  exclusively  on 
other  snakes,  venomous  ones  by  preference.  Within  the  moats  that 
inclose  this  species  are  many  others  which  only  repeated  assurance 
would  convince  the  novice  are  not  dangerous.  The  non-venomous 
snakes  are  in  general  larger  than  the  others,  and  may  also  be  distin- 
guished by  the  lack  of  any  special  tail,  being,  as  it  were,  all  of  one 
piece.  If  the  employees  of  the  institute,  from  the  scientists  in  charge 
of  serum-making  to  the  negro  snake-herders,  are  to  be  believed,  there 
are  other  differences :  the  harmless  snakes  lay  eggs,  while  the  others 
produce  their  young  alive ;  the  fomier  must  be  fed,  and  the  latter  have 
never  been  caught  taking  nourishment  since  the  institute  was  started. 
Some  of  the  harmless  cobras  attain  considerable  size,  though  by  no 
means  any  such  as  they  do  in  popular  jungle  tales.  The  largest  ii"* 
captivity  at  Sao  Paulo  was  a  species  of  constrictor  about  sixteen  fee^ 
long  and  as  large  around  as  a  rainpipe.  They  vary  widely,  too.  in 
habits.    The  snciiry  is  huge,  clumsy,  and  sluggish ;  a  large  brown  snake 


i66  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

in  the  same  inclosure  was  almost  lightning-like  in  its  movements,  snap- 
ping at  the  flap  of  the  attendant's  trousers  and  returning  to  the  attack 
with  incredible  swiftness  as  often  as  the  latter  threw  him  away 
with  his  crooked  iron  stick.  Like  so  many  really  harmless  creatures  he 
is  evidently  given  his  vicious  temper  to  make  up  for  the  lack  of  any  real 
defense.  This  reptile  is  said  to  follow  for  miles  any  creature  that 
angers  it,  and  though  its  bite  is  harmless,  only  a  man  with  long  ex- 
perience or  iron  nerve  could  resist  taking  to  his  heels  when  this  per- 
sonification of  speed  and  anger  dashes  upon  him  with  its  great  jaws 
wide  open.  All  such  species,  however,  are  mere  souvenirs  of  the 
scrtdo,  of  no  other  use  than  to  keep  company  for  the  mussurama, 
great  numbers  of  which  are  sent  to  the  snake-infested  areas  of  Brazil 
as  rapidly  as  they  attain  mature  size. 

On  my  second  or  third  visit,  after  I  had  won  his  gratitude  with  my 
kodak,  the  chief  snake-herder  arranged  a  special  snake-eating  contest. 
Into  a  moated  compound  of  mussura^nas  he  threw  a  jararaca  de  rabo 
branco,  the  most  deadly  snake  of  Brazil.  Far  from  pouncing  upon  the 
newcomer,  the  black  cannibals  gave  it  no  attention  whatever.  The 
attendant  stepped  over  the  wall  and  introduced  the  visitor  to  his  hosts 
one  by  one.  The  first  turned  up  his  nose  at  it,  which  drew  forth  the 
information  that  this  one  had  eaten  only  a  week  before  and  was  not 
yet  hungry.  The  second  had  not  dined  for  at  least  a  fortnight.  No 
sooner  had  the  jararaca  been  tossed  near  him  than  he  sprang  forward 
and  wound  himself  about  the  other  so  rapidly  that  the  eye  could  not 
follow  the  individual  movements,  kinking  and  knotting  him  in  an  intri- 
cate entanglement  in  which  only  their  difference  in  color  distinguished 
one  slimy  body  from  the  other.  The  two  snakes  were  almost  of  a  size, 
about  three  feet  long.  The  jararaca  writhed  in  agony,  opened  his  huge 
mouth  with  its  two  ugly  looking  fangs  on  the  upper  jaw,  and  struck 
hard  into  the  black  body  of  his  opponent,  the  yellow  venom  running 
down  over  his  scales.  The  only  response  of  the  oppressor  was  to  in- 
crease the  entanglement  until  the  head  of  the  jararaca  was  confined  in 
a  coil,  as  his  own  was  protected  within  the  folds  of  his  own  body. 

For  more  than  twenty  minutes  after  his  first  sudden  movements 
the  mussurama  scarcely  moved  a  scale.  I  began  to  think  he  had  gone 
to  sleep  again.  Then  gradually,  imperceptibly,  almost  as  slowly  as 
the  minute-hand  of  a  clock  moves,  he  withdrew  his  own  head  from  the 
coil  that  had  protected  it,  looked  cautiously  about  to  see  whether  dan- 
ger threatened,  then  moving  one  muscle  at  a  time,  with  the  patience 
of  a  professional  wrestler,  he  worked  his  frog-mouth  side  wise  slowly 


BUMPING  UP  TO  RIO  167 

along  the  body  of  the  jararaca  until  he  reached  the  neck.  Pulling  the 
head  carefully  out  of  its  confining  coil,  he  crushed  it  flat  by  slow 
pressure  of  his  powerful  mouth.  Only  then  did  he  appear  satisfied  and 
at  ease.  Disentangling  himself,  he  began  to  swallow  the  jararaca  head 
first,  working  his  way  along  it  in  successive  bites  at  about  the  speed 
with  which  a  lady  might  put  on  the  finger  of  a  new  glove,  now  and 
then  wriggling  his  body  to  increase  its  capacity.  Once  he  stopped, 
rolled  a  bit,  and  took  a  long  breath,  then  went  steadily  on  until  the 
white  tail  of  the  jararaca,  looking  for  a  moment  like  a  long  tongue  of  his 
own,  disappeared  entirely,  perhaps  four  minutes  from  the  time  the 
swallowing  had  begun,  and  the  snake  that  was  left  where  two  had 
been  before  crawled  lazily  away  to  his  cement  house  for  a  fortnight's 
sleep. 

I  remained  for  some  time  in  Sao  Paulo  not  only  because  it  proved 
to  be  a  city  worth  exploring,  but  because  I  had  come  to  the  end  of  my 
railroad  passes,  and  unless  I  could  discover  a  new  source  of  supply 
I  faced  the  painful  and  unusual  experience  of  having  to  pay  my  fare. 
To  tell  the  truth,  so  weary  had  I  become  of  train  riding  and  re- 
spectability that  I  found  myself  planning  to  slip  into  my  oldest  clothes, 
pick  up  a  fellow-beachcomber,  and  take  to  the  road  for  the  three  hun- 
dred and  twenty  miles  left  to  Rio.  But  short  samples  convinced  me 
that  such  a  walk  would  not  prove  entirely  a  pleasure  jaunt  and  rail- 
way passes  evidently  do  not  grow  on  Sao  Paulo  bushes.  I  was  forced, 
therefore,  to  fall  back  on  my  own  slender  funds.  There  is  frequent 
and  comfortable  service  from  Sao  Paulo  to  Rio  four  times  a  day  in 
twelve  hours  by  day  or  night  on  the  government  railway,  but  a  more 
pleasant  as  well  as  cheaper  route  appeared  to  be  that  by  way  of  Santos 
and  an  ocean  steamer ;  moreover,  it  seemed  more  fitting  to  enter  the 
far-famed  harbor  of  the  Brazilian  capital  by  the  harbor's  mouth  than 
to  sneak  in  at  the  back  door  by  the  government  railway. 

An  excellent  express  of  the  British  "Sao  Paulo  Railway  Company" 
left  the  industrial  capital  at  eight  in  the  morning  and  raced  thirty  of 
the  fifty  miles  to  Santos  across  level  country  in  less  than  an  hour. 
Then  we  halted  at  Alto  da  Serra  for  the  inevitable  coffee  and  a  new 
engine.  This  was  small  and  inclosed  within  a  sort  of  car  with  elass- 
protected  observation  platform,  for  almost  the  only  work  required  of 
it  was  to  hook  us,  two  cars  at  a  time,  to  a  cable  running  on  large  up- 
right wheels  between  the  rails,  two  small  trains  counterbalancing  each 
other  at  opposite  ends  of  the  cable  making  little  motive  pov.xr  neces- 
sary.    Just  beyond  was  the  ahcrtura,  the  "opening"  or  jumping-off  place. 


i68  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

where  the  world  suddenly  spread  out  far  below,  some  of  it  visible, 
some  hidden  by  vast  banks  of  mist  slowly  melting  under  the  torrid 
sun.  The  cable  let  us  down  more  than  two  thousand  feet  in  a  very 
few  miles,  the  descending  and  ascending  trains  passing  each  other 
automatically  on  a  switch  halfway  down.  The  road  was  so  swift  that 
the  buildings  along  the  way  seemed  sharply  tilted  uphill,  but  though 
the  valley  v/as  densely  wooded  with  scrub  growth,  it  was  only  a  nar- 
row one,  so  that  while  the  engineering  feat  may  be  as  remarkable,  the 
scenery  was  by  no  means  equal  to  the  descent  to  Paranagua.  It  took 
as  long  to  lower  us  to  Piassagiiera  in  its  banana-fields,  only  eight  miles 
without  stops,  as  it  had  to  cover  the  thirty  miles  with  several  halts 
from  Sao  Paulo  to  the  opening  of  the  range.  This  road,  over  which 
virtually  all  the  coffee  grown  in  Brazil  starts  to  the  outside  world,  is 
reputed  to  be  one  of  the  richest  concessions  on  earth,  though  its  char- 
ter restricts  its  net  profits  to  a  certain  percentage  of  the  invested  capital, 
the  rest  going  to  the  government.  The  company  has  always  had  great 
difficulty  in  devising  ways  and  means  to  spend  its  surplus  earnings 
and  keep  them  from  falling  into  the  public  coffers.  It  is  rumored 
that  all  the  switch-lamps  are  silver-plated.  The  latest  plan  of  the 
harassed  directors  is  to  electrify  the  road,  but  to  the  casual  observer 
this  would  seem  exceedingly  unwise,  for  heavy  coffee  trains  coasting 
down  the  hill  might  store  up  electricity  enough  to  run  the  entire  road, 
and  wdth  no  more  coal  to  buy  at  the  breath-taking  price  of  that  com- 
modity in  Brazil  the  problem  of  spending  their  surplus  would  be- 
come hopeless. 

Santos  is  even  older  than  Sao  Paulo,  having  been  founded  by  Thome 
de  Souza  two  years  earlier.  Not  so  long  ago  it  was  a  pesthole,  noted 
especially  for  its  yellow  fever.  Those  unpleasant  days  are  forever 
gone,  though  it  is  still  not  a  health  resort  and  many  of  its  people  pre- 
fer to  live  in  Sao  Paulo  and  come  down  daily  on  business.  If  it  was 
not  always  raining  in  torrents  during  my  stay  there,  at  least  it  was 
overhung  by  a  soggy,  humid  heat  that  had  nothing  in  common  with 
the  cool,  clear  atmosphere  of  Sao  Paulo.  Such  air  as  arises  in  Santos 
drags  its  way  sluggishly  through  the  streets,  and  there  was  a  heavy, 
blue-mood  temperament  about  the  place  quite  unlike  the  larger  city 
up  the  hill. 

This  languid,  gloomy  mood  pervaded  even  the  club  in  which  a  group 
of  Americans  sit  all  day  long,  day  after  day,  "mopping  up  booze,"  ex- 
changing the  chips  that  pass  in  the  night,  and  buying  coffee.  The  last 
is  their  appointed  task,  but  it  is  a  light  one.     Every  now  and  they  « 


BUMPING  UP  TO  RIO  169 

dealer  or  a  native  messenger  comes  in  with  a  name,  a  price,  and  one  or 
two  other  hieroglyphics  scratched  on  a  slip  of  paper ;  one  of  the  huyers 
lays  aside  his  cards  long  enough  to  "o.  k."  it,  and  the  deed  is  done. 
Santos  exports  a  million  dollars'  worth  of  produce  to  the  United  States 
each  year,  "about  one  hundred  per  cent,  of  which  is  coffee."  When 
one  compares  the  retail  price  of  this  commodity  in  the  American  mar- 
ket with  what  the  planters  of  Sao  Paulo  state  get  for  it,  the  wonder 
arises  as  to  where  the  difference  goes.  Some  of  it,  of  course,  goes  to 
the  world-weary  men  who  spend  their  days  exchanging  chips  at  the 
club  in  Santos ;  transportation  takes  its  full  share ;  a  high  ad  valorem 
export  tax  goes  to  the  federal  government ;  a  similar  impost  of  five 
francs  a  sack  goes  to  the  State  of  Sao  Paulo ;  the  municipalities  through 
which  it  passes  do  not  allow  themselves  to  be  forgotten ;  the  Euro- 
pean builders  of  the  port  improvements  exact  their  generous  pound  of 
flesh ;  and  "official  charges"  thrust  out  a  curved  palm  at  every  step, 
so  that  whoever  drinks  coffee  helps  generously  to  support  the  plethora 
of  mulatto  politicians  of  Brazil.  Yet  even  then  the  State  of  Sao  Paulo 
is  not  satisfied  with  the  price  paid  for  its  principal  product  and  in  order 
that  this  may  fall  no  lower  prohibitive  taxes  now  make  it  impossible 
to  lay  out  new  coffee  plantations  within  the  state. 

In  all  the  business  section  of  Santos  there  are  pungently  scented 
warehouses  in  which  coffee  is  picked  over  by  hand  by  women  and  chil- 
dren whose  knowledge  of  sanitary  principles  is  embryonic;  while  down 
at  the  wharves  the  coffee-porters  give  the  town  a  picturesque  touch. 
Long  lines  of  European  laborers,  dressed  in  undershirt,  cotton  trou- 
sers, a  cloth  belt,  and  a  tight  skull-cap,  all  more  or  less  ragged,  dis- 
colored and  soaked  with  sweat,  trot  from  train  to  warehouse  or  from 
warehouse  to  ship,  each  with  a  sack  of  coffee  set  up  on  his  neck,  mov- 
ing with  a  jerk  of  the  hips  and  keeping  the  rest  of  the  body  quite 
rigid.  Their  manners  are  gayer  than  one  might  expect  of  men  constantly 
bearing  such  burdens.  The  law  requires  that  each  sack  weigh  exactly 
sixty  kilograms,  about  132  pounds,  that  the  state  may  levy  its  tax 
without  difficulty ;  and  the  men  are  paid  sixty  reis  for  every  sack  they 
carry.  In  the  slave  days  of  thirty  years  and  more  ago  this  coffee- 
carrying  was  done  by  African  chattels,  trotting  in  unison  to  the  time 
of  their  melancholy-boisterous  native  melodies.  Now  there  is  not  a 
drop  of  African  blood  among  the  carriers,  though  there  were  not  a 
few  haughty  negroes  in  uniform  sitting  in  the  shade  superintending  the 
job  and  down  on  a  tiny  cruiser  nearby  all  the  sailors  were  of  that  race. 
The  Portuguese  have  driven  out  the  negro  carriers  by  their  greater 


I70  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

strength  and  diligence,  but  they  in  turn  are  being  superseded  by 
modern  improvements. 

"Brazil  is  no  good  any  more,"  grumbled  a  sweat-soaked  son  of  Lis- 
bon with  whom  I  spoke.  "It  is  forbidden  now  to  carry  two  sacks  at 
a  time,  and  these  great  carrier-belts  they  are  putting  in,  as  well  as 
the  auto-trucks,  are  robbing  us  of  our  livelihood." 

Santos  has  now  grown  almost  wholly  around  a  steep,  rocky  hill  that 
was  once  on  its  outskirts,  spreading  in  wide,  right-angled  streets  lined 
by  pretentious  light-colored  dwellings  to  the  seashore,  with  several 
large  bathing-season  hotels  and  many  fine  beaches  along  the  scalloped 
coast.  Up  at  the  top  of  this  hill  in  the  center  of  the  fiat  modern  town 
is  an  ancient  place  of  pilgrimage  known  as  the  "Santuario  de  Nossa 
Senhora  de  Monte  Serrat,"  overflowing,  like  that  of  Penha,  with 
wax  imitations  of  cures.  Prices  were  distressingly  high  in  Santos. 
Bananas,  which  overload  the  landscape  about  the  town,  cost  600  reis 
each  in  any  restaurant;  and  all  else  was  in  proportion.  No  doubt  milk 
must  be  sold  at  32  cents  a  quart  in  a  town  where  the  milkmen  drive 
about  in  luxurious  go-carts,  dressed  as  if  on  their  way  to  a  wedding. 
But  such  things  are  painful  to  the  wanderer  who  has  already  begun  to 
doubt  his  ability  to  pay  his  way  home  from  the  next  port,  particularly 
when  he  finds  that  for  once  there  is  no  steamer  bound  thither  for  sev- 
eral days,  and  that  the  fare  for  the  overnight  sea-trip  is  half  as  much 
as  that  to  Europe. 

It  was  too  late  to  change  my  plans  and  make  the  journey  to  Rio  by 
rail,  however,  and  I  made  the  best  of  the  delay  by  joining  a  Sunday 
excursion  to  Guaraja,  a  beach  with  a  Ritz-Carlton  hotel  that  was  be- 
ing "boomed"  a  few  miles  out  through  the  wilderness.  A  little  steamer 
carried  us  from  the  Santos  docks  to  a  station  across  the  harbor,  from 
which  a  tiny  steam  railroad  runs  off  through  the  jungle.  The  benches 
were  hard,  the  toy  engine  incessantly  spat  smoke,  cinders,  and  fire 
back  upon  us,  and  a  woman  of  the  laboring  class  was  jammed  into 
close,  popular-excursion  contact  with  me  throughout  the  journey.  But 
the  beach  of  Guaraja  was  fine  and  hard,  and  the  day  brilliant  and 
clear.  Chalets,  bandstands,  and  all  the  Palm  Beach  paraphernalia  re- 
called the  season  of  six  to  eight  weeks  during  which  coffee  kings  and 
their  mistresses  hold  high  revel  and  yield  the  promoters  a  good  year's 
profit  on  their  investment.  Natives,  both  men  and  women,  had  here 
and  there  rolled  up  their  trousers  or  the  feminine  counterpart  and 
gone  wading,  but  evidently  it  was  not  considered  the  proper  season  to 
«wim,  for  all  the  heat  of  midwinter  July,  or  else  the  community  had 


BUMPING  UP  TO  RIO  171 

the  customary  South  American  fear  of  "wetting  the  body  all  over." 
Gringos  may  always  take  their  own  risks,  however,  and  by  dint  of 
long  inquiry  I  found  I  could  get  an  ill-fitting  bathing-suit  and  the  key 
to  a  bathhouse,  all  for  a  mere  2000  reis,  and  I  went  in  alone. 

It  was  the  first  time  I  had  been  in  or  upon  the  sea  since  entering 
South  America  way  up  on  the  gulf  of  Panama  more  than  two  years 
before.  I  plunged  in  and  was  soon  diving  under  the  combers  and 
enjoying  myself  hugely,  when  I  suddenly  found  that  I  could  not  touch 
bottom,  and  that  the  more  I  tried  the  less  I  touched.  This  would  not 
have  mattered  had  I  not  realized  by  some  indcfmable  sense  that  I 
was  not  only  in  an  ebbing  tide  but  that  I  was  caught  in  an  undertow 
which  was  dragging  me  swiftly  seaward.  The  buildings  and  the 
excursionists  on  the  shore  were  growing  slowly  but  steadily  smaller. 
I  waved  an  arm  above  the  water  and  attracted  the  attention  of  a  group 
of  men,  but  it  was  evident  by  their  indecisive  actions  that  they  were 
"Spigs"  and  that  no  help  would  come  from  that  quarter,  though  they 
might  be  of  use  in  testifying  before  the  coroner's  jury.  Among  the 
Sunday  crowd  on  the  shore  and  the  hotel  veranda  arose  more  stir 
than  I  had  yet  caused  anywhere  in  Brazil,  and  the  bathhouse  attendant 
who  had  taken  the  2000  reis  away  from  me  rushed  down  to  the  spray's 
edge  frantically  waving  his  arms.  For  the  next  twenty  minutes  or  so 
I  had  visions  of  navigating  the  high  seas  without  a  ship,  but  as  I 
did  not  confine  myself  during  that  time  to  smiling  at  the  vision,  but 
took  to  performing  superhuman  feats  of  swimming,  I  was  suddenly 
surprised,  not  to  say  relieved,  to  feel  my  feet  strike  sand,  and  what 
might  have  been  a  coroner's  inquest  turned  out  to  be  nothing  but  a  les- 
son for  the  foolhardy.  When  I  returned  to  dress,  the  attendant  said 
that  he  had  forgotten  to  tell  me  that  certain  parts  of  this  beach  had  a 
very  dangerous  undertow.  Posthumous  information  was  to  be  expected 
of  a  Brazilian ;  but  when  the  American  of  Santos  who  had  suggested 
my  spending  the  Sunday  at  Guaraja  replied  to  my  mention  of  the 
entirely  personal  incident,  w^hile  we  were  lunching  at  the  Sportsman 
Cafe  next  day — at  his  expense — with  "Oh,  yes,  I  forgot  to  tell  you 
that  is  the  most  dangerous  beach  in  South  America,  hardly  a  Sunday 
passes  without  someone  drowning  there,"  I  could  not  but  thank  him 
fervently  for  his  kind  warning. 

The  steamer  of  the  Spanish  line  owned  by  the  Jesuits  spent  most 
of  Tuesday  in  "leaving  within  live  minutes,''  during  which  the  passen- 
gers all  but  succumbed  to  uproar,  congestion,  and  perspiration.  I  found 
myself  ppcked  into  a  tiny  two-berth  cabin  with  two  other  travelers 


172  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

whom  I  should  not  naturally  have  chosen  as  companions;  nowhere  was 
there  a  spot  clean  and  large  enough  on  which  to  sit  down.  Once 
a  refresco,  a  glass  of  sickly  sweetened  water,  was  served  to  us  as  a 
special  favor  just  before  we  choked  to  death,  and  finally  about  five 
in  the  afternoon  we  let  go  the  wharf,  made  a  nearly  complete  circle 
with  the  "river"  on  which  Santos  is  located,  and  dipping  our  flag  to 
its  last  fort,  were  soon  out  on  the  high  seas,  the  roll  of  which  I  had 
almost  forgotten. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

AT    LARGK    IN    RIO   DE    JANEIRO 

1  AWOKE  at  dawn  just  as  we  were  entering  the  harbor  of  Rio  de 
Janeiro.  On  the  extreme  points  of  land  on  either  side  croucheci 
two  old-fashioned  fortresses;  back  of  one  of  them,  scarcely  u 
stone's  throw  away,  rose  the  sheer  rock  of  the  "Sugar  Loaf,"  like  a 
gigantic  upright  thumb,  and  a  moment  later  I  saw  the  sun  rise  red 
over  a  great  tumble  of  peaks  along  the  shore,  among  which  I  reco;^,- 
nized  the  "Hunchback"  stooping  broodingly  over  the  almost  invisible 
city.  A  haze  hid  all  of  this,  except  for  a  long  line  of  little  house?. 
like  children's  blocks,  along  the  foot  of  great  cliffs.  Then  bit  by  bit. 
as  the  sun  sponged  up  the  mists,  the  scene  spread  and  took  on  detail 
until  it  became  perhaps  the  sublimest  spectacle  of  nature  my  eyes  had 
yet  fallen  upon  in  all  the  circuit  of  the  earth,  a  sight  not  only  in- 
comparable but  one  that  obliterated  the  disappointment  inherent  in  all 
long-imagined  and  often-heralded  scenes. 

The  vast  bay,  of  irregular  shape  and  everyw^here  dotted  with  islands, 
was  walled  on  every  side  by  a  tumultuous  labyrinth  of  mountains,  some 
sheer  rounded  masses  of  bare  rock  and  precipitous  cliffs  on  which  na- 
ture had  not  been  able  to  get  the  slightest  foothold,  the  majority  a 
chaotic  maze  of  ridges,  peaks,  and  fantastic  headlands  covered  with 
the  densest  vegetation,  terminating  in  lofty  Tijuca  and  with  a  dim. 
dark-blue  background  of  the  range  called  "the  Organs."  The  city  it- 
self, of  many  striking  colors  reflected  in  the  blue-green  sea  along 
which  it  stretched  in  endless  public  gardens  and  esplanades  skirting 
the  water  front,  was  strewn  in  and  among  these  hills  as  if  it  had 
been  poured  out  in  a  fluid  form  and  left  to  run  into  the  crevices  and 
crannies,  the  scum,  in  the  form  of  makeshift  shanties,  rising  to  the 
tops  of  the  niorros  which  everywhere  bulked  above  the  general  level, 
the  more  important  of  them  crowned  by  picturesque  old  castles  that 
stood  out  sharp-cut  against  the  green  background. 

But  if  nature  is  peerless  in  Rio,  one  quickly  discovers  that  man  is 
still  the  same  troublesome  little  shrimp  he  is  everywhere.  We  crawled 
at  a  snail's  pace  past  a  rocky  islet  covered  with  royal  palms  and  a  tur- 

IJ3 


174  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

reted  castle,  past  seven  large  Brazilian  battleships,  among  them  the 
Minas  Gcraes  that  had  recently  mutinied  and  bombarded  the  capital, 
and  finally  came  to  anchor  well  out  in  the  bay.  When  our  baggage 
had  been  rummaged  by  a  flock  of  negroid  officials  quite  as  if  we  had 
arrived  from  a  foreign  country,  we  were  privileged  to  pay  foul-tongued 
and  clamoring  boatmen  several  thousand  reis  each  to  row  us  the  few 
hundred  yards  to  the  shore.  Rio  has  ample  wharves,  but  passing 
vessels  avoid  the  use  of  them  whenever  possible,  lest  the  European  ex- 
ploiters pocket  whatever  profit  the  ships  pick  up  on  the  high  seas. 

I  wandered  the  crowded  and  blazing  streets  for  some  time  before  I 
decided  to  try  my  luck  at  the  "Pensao  Americana"  in  the  Rua  Larga, 
or  Wide  Street.  Here,  for  six  thousand  reis  a  day,  I  was  permitted 
to  occupy  a  breathless  little  inside  den  and  to  eat  whatever  I  found 
edible  among  the  native  dishes  set  before  us  on  a  free-for-all  table 
at  noon  and  evening.  I  was  back  in  rice-land  again,  that  inexcusable 
substitute  for  food,  the  only  thing  on  the  menu  of  which  there  was 
anything  like  abundance,  being  served  at  every  meal  and  on  every 
possible  pretext.  This  and  the  feijdo,  the  small  black  bean  of  Rio 
Grande  do  Sul,  with  now  and  then  a  bit  of  xarque,  dried  or  salted 
beef,  added  to  give  it  distinction,  makes  up  the  buU-:  of  any  native 
Brazilian  repast  in  such  rendezvous  of  starvation  as  the  "Pensao  Am.er- 
icana."  The  only  drink  furnished  was  water,  and  one  soon  learns  to 
avoid  that  in  tropical  Brazil,  One  dining-room  wall  was  decorated 
with  large  glaring  advertisements  of  beer  and  shoes,  on  the  other  was 
an  enormous  and  gaily  colored  chromo  of  the  Last  Supper,  at  which  the 
fare  was  as  scanty  as  our  own.  The  general  parlor  in  the  front  of  the 
second  story  and  opening  upon  the  wide  street  might  have  been  pass- 
able as  a  lounging-place  had  not  noisy,  undisciplined  brats  been  con- 
stantly running  about  it  and  the  snarly,  quarrelsome  air  of  cheap  board- 
ing-houses the  world  over  everywhere  pervaded  it.  The  entire  estab- 
lishment was  an  unceasing  bedlam.  Women  shrieking  as  only  Latin- 
American  women  can  gave  no  respite  from  dawn  to  midnight ;  most  of 
them  kept  pet  parrots — or  toucans,  which  are  several  times  worse — 
and  occasionally  an  entire  flock  of  parrakeets.  My  bed  proved  to  be 
of  solid  boards  with  an  imitation  mattress  two  inches  thick.  The  gas 
is  turned  off  in  Rio  at  ten  in  the  evening,  and  we  had  no  electricity. 
I  could  not  read  for  lack  of  light,  I  could  not  sleep  because  of  the 
sweltering  heat  inside  my  cubbyhole,  stagnant  as  only  an  interior  dun- 
geon in  the  tropics  can  be,  and  the  uproar  beyond  the  half-inch  par- 
titions, which  in  no  way  deadened  the  nightly  domestic  activities  of 


AT  LARGE  IN  RIO  DE  JANEIRO  17$ 

the  families  about  mc.    W'hcn  I  did  at  leng^th  doze  off  toward  dawn  it 
Avas  only  to  dream  madly. 

The  evening's  determination  to  move,  even  if  I  must  sleep  in  the 
streets,  was  strengthened  by  the  rumpus  that  awoke  me  at  daylight 
and  by  the  thimbleful  of  black  coffee  that  constituted  the  only  break- 
fast served  until  eleven.  I  struck  out  none  too  hopefully  to  recan- 
vass  the  town.  A  white  cardboard  swinging  at  the  end  of  a  string 
from  a  balcony  window,  I  soon  discovered,  meant  that  a  room  was 
for  rent,  but  though  these  were  numerous  they  were  all  unfurnished. 
Those  who  rented  furnished  quarters  were  expected  to  eat  in  the 
same  house,  and  6000  was  evidently  the  rock-bottom  price  for  board 
and  room  anywhere  in  Rio.  For  that  sum  I  could  get  real  food  and 
a  tolerable  room  in  a  hotel  kept  by  a  German  in  the  Rua  do  Acre  in 
the  heart  of  the  downtown  section,  and  it  mattered  little  that  the 
pungent  smell  of  raw  coffee  struck  one  full  in  the  face  in  passing  the 
open  doors  of  the  warehouses  in  the  Rua  Sao  Bento  and  the  adjoining 
streets  leading  to  it. 

The  Rua  do  Acre  opens  out  upon  the  wharves  at  the  beginning  of 
the  broad  Avenida  Central,  gashed  from  sea  to  sea  straight  through 
the  heart  of  the  business  section  of  Rio.  Both  in  history  and  ap- 
pearance this  new  main  downtown  artery  of  the  Brazilian  capital  is 
similar  to  the  Avenida  de  Mayo  in  Buenos  Aires,  which,  though  it  does 
not  rival  it  in  length,  it  outdoes  in  some  respects,  particularly  in  the 
picturesqueness  of  the  t}  pes  that  pass  along  it.  Old  Rio  was  crowded 
together  in  medieval  congestion  on  the  principal  point  of  land  jutting 
into  the  harbor,  and  in  time  this  portion  became  so  densely  populated 
with  business  and  so  inadequate  under  modern  traffic  conditions  that 
nothing  but  surgery  could  save  it.  The  major  operation  of  cutting 
this  broad  avenue  through  the  compact  old  town  was  intrusted  to 
the  Baron  of  Rio  Branco,  and  it  still  officially  bears  his  name.  Early 
in  the  present  century  his  plans  were  carried  out  at  the  expense  of 
much  cost  and  destruction,  and  in  place  of  a  labyrinth  of  narrow 
unsavorv  streets  and  aged  unsanitary  buildings  there  appeared  in  an 
incredibly  short  space  of  time  a  passageway  a  hundred  meters  wide 
and  more  than  two  thousand  meters  long  running  with  geometrical 
precision  from  the  inner  harbor  to  the  Monroe  Palace  on  the  edge  of 
the  Beira  Mar,  with  the  "Sugar  Loaf"  set  exactly  at  the  end  of  the 
vista. 

There  are  many  things  of  interest  in  downtown  Rio,  but  of  them  ail 
perhaps  the  Avenida  Rio  Branco  is  the  most  enticing.     Stroll  where 


176  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

one  will  on  either  side  of  it,  to  the  Arsenal,  the  Ministries,  the  palace 
where  the  last  emperor  of  the  western  hemisphere  had  his  official  resi- 
dence up  to  little  more  than  thirty  years  ago,  to  the  heavy  and  not 
particularly  striking  cathedral,  one  is  sure  to  drift  unconsciously  back 
and  take  again  to  wandering  aimlessly  along  in  the  human  stream  that 
surges  as  incessantly  through  the  Avenida  as  if  the  populace  were  still 
enjoying  the  novelty  of  moving  freely  where  their  ancestors  could 
not  pass.  The  only  other  street  in  old  Rio  that  has  anything  like  the 
same  fascination  is  the  narrow  Rua  Ouvidor,  as  it  is  still  known  in 
popular  speech,  though  the  city  fathers  long  since  decreed  that  it  shall 
be  called  the  Rua  Moreira  Cesar.  This  is  to  Rio  what  the  Calle  Florida 
is  to  Buenos  Aires,  not  merely  a  populous  street  but  a  popular  insti- 
tution. Along  it  are  the  most  brilliant  shops,  in  it  may  be  seen  the 
most  exclusive  residents  of  Rio  greeting  one  another  with  the  elabo- 
rate and  leisurely  formality  of  their  class.  Level  paved  from  wall  to 
wall,  it  is  in  reality  a  broad  sidewalk,  for  here  wheeled  vehicles  may 
not  enter  at  any  hour  whatever.  Yet  even  the  enticing  windows  and  the 
now  and  then  attractive  shoppers  of  the  Rua  Ouvidor  do  not  often 
keep  the  stroller  long  from  wandering  once  more  out  into  the  Avenida. 

For  all  its  width  it  is  not  easy  to  walk  along  the  Avenida.  What 
might  be  called  "sidewalk  manners"  are  atrocious  throughout  South 
America ;  in  Rio  they  are  at  their  worst.  This  is  not  because  the 
Fluminenses — for  these,  too,  call  themselves  "rivereens,"  though  they 
are  far  from  any  real  river — are  especially  inconsiderate,  but  because 
they  are  tropical  idlers  with  no  fixed  habit  of  mind,  and  instead  of  pick- 
ing a  straightforward  course  down  the  broad  avenue  they  wander 
back  and  forth  across  one's  path  in  all  sorts  of  erratic  diagonals.  The 
pace  of  life  slows  down  noticeably  in  twelve  degrees  of  latitude,  and 
street  crowds  are  not  only  slower  but  much  more  stagnant  in  Rio  than 
in  Buenos  Aires.  In  time  the  direct  and  hurrying  northerner  comes 
to  realize  that  the  Avenida  is  not  designed  to  be  merely  a  passageway 
from  somewhere  to  somewhere  else.  It  is  somewhere  itself,  a  loung- 
I'ng-place,  a  locality  in  which  to  show  off  at  one's  best,  a  splendid  site 
for  cafe  chairs  and  tables.  By  late  afternoon  it  is  often  so  blocked 
that  passage  along  it  is  a  constant  struggle ;  in  the  evening  clumps  of 
seated  coffee  sippers  and  groups  of  gossiping  men  fill  the  broad  side- 
walks almost  to  impassability. 

These  sidewalks  of  the  Avenida  were  evidently  laid  with  the 
connivance  of  shoemakers.  Most  of  them  are  mosaics  of  black  and 
white  broken  stone  in  striking  designs  and   fantastic  patterns,  here 


AT  LARGE  IN  RIO  DK  JANEIRO  177 

geometrical,  there  in  the  form  of  flowers,  with  horsey  figures  before 
the  Jockey  Club,  nautical  tilings  before  the  Naval  Club,  all  of  striking 
effect  when  seen,  for  instance,  from  the  upper  windows  of  the  Jornal 
do  Commcrcio  building,  but  particularly  deadly  on  shoe  leather.  An 
architect  might  have  much  to  say  of  the  score  of  splendid  structures 
that  flank  the  avenue.  Some  are  merely  business  houses;  farther 
seaward,  beyond  two  great  hotels,  are  clustered  the  sumptuous  Mu- 
nicipal Theater,  the  School  of  Fine  Arts,  and  the  National  Library; 
set  a  little  back  from  the  street  are  the  Supreme  Tribunal  and  the 
Municipal  Council  until  the  Avenida  breaks  out  at  length  into  the 
Beira  Mar  beside  the  Palacio  Monroe  in  its  little  park.  This  last  mar- 
ble and  granite  edifice  was  carried  back  from  our  St.  Louis  Exposi- 
tion and  set  up  chiefly  as  a  show-place  and  an  ultra-formal  gathering- 
hall,  but  the  Chamber  of  Deputies  has  been  meeting  there  since  their 
old  firetrap  on  the  Praga  da  Republica  took  to  falling  about  their  ears. 
Beyond  it  lie  the  blue  waters  of  the  oval  bay,  across  which,  always  in 
full  view  from  anywhere  on  the  avenue,  stands  the  Pdo  d'Assucar, 
like  a  rearing  monolith,  the  thread-like  cable  that  now  and  then  carries 
a  car  to  or  from  its  summit  plainly  visible  in  the  clear  tropical  sun- 
shine. 

However,  it  is  not  these  more  formal  things  but  rather  the  continual 
interweaving  of  curious  and  motley  types,  the  air  of  unworried  tropi- 
cal indolence  that  pervades  the  throng,  the  brilliance  of  the  night  lights 
that  draw  the  idler  again  and  again  to  the  chief  artery  of  downtown 
Rio.  Particularly  after  the  hour  of  siesta  does  the  capital  exchange 
the  extreme  negligee  of  the  household  for  its  most  resplendent  garb 
and  sally  forth  to  stroll  the  Avenida,  the  women  with  curiously  ex- 
pressionless faces,  as  if  they  would  prove  themselves  deaf  to  the  audi- 
bly flattering  male  groups  that  grow  larger  and  larger  until  by  sunset 
the  sidewalks  become  a  great  salon  rather  than  places  of  locomotion. 
Foreigners  and  those  who  have  lost  the  spirit  of  Rio  and  must  hurry 
may  take  a  taxi.  These  pour  so  continually  past,  day  and  night,  that 
to  cross  the  Avenida  is  a  perilous  undertaking  at  any  hour,  for  the 
personal  politeness  of  the  Fluminense  does  not  extend  to  his  automo- 
biles, and  the  chances  of  being  run  down,  particularly  by  empty  ma- 
chines cruising  for  fares,  are  excellent.  Nor  is  it  worth  while  for 
the  lone  pedestrian  to  protest,  for  the  odds  are  against  him.  Both 
private  automobiles  and  those  for  hire  carry  two  chauffeurs,  usually 
in  white  uniforms,  less  often  unquestionably  of  that  complexion,  their 
faces  studies  in  haughtiness  as  they  gaze  down  upon  the  plebeian  foot- 


178  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

going  multitude.  The  extra  man  is  known  colloquially  as  the  "secre- 
tary," and  the  custom  is  said  to  have  arisen  from  the  fact  that  before 
the  law  required  meters  taxis  charged  all  the  traffic  would  bear  and 
it  often  took  two  men  to  collect  from  recalcitrant  customers.  But  its 
persistence  suggests  that  there  are  other  reasons,  among  them  the 
Brazilian  love  of  sinecures,  the  terror  which  solitary  labor  causes  to 
the  tropical  temperament,  the  pleasure  of  having  a  congenial  friend 
always  hanging  about,  the  excess  of  population  over  jobs,  the  real 
chauffeur's  need  of  someone  to  crank  his  car,  light  his  cigarette,  and 
keep  an  eye  on  the  police,  most  of  all,  perhaps,  the  Brazilian  love  of 
fazcndo  fita.  Literally  fazendo  fita  means  "making  a  film,"  but  by 
extension  it  has  come  to  signify  posing  for  the  moving-picture  camera, 
hence,  in  the  slang  of  Rio,  "showing  off."  It  is  a  rare  Brazilian  who 
is  not  given  to  acting  for  the  movies  in  this  sense.  Watch  a  traffic 
policeman,  in  his  resplendent  uniform  and  white  gloves,  and  you  will 
find  that  he  is  much  more  seriously  bent  on  displaying  his  manly 
form  and  graceful  deportment  to  a  supposedly  admiring  audience  than 
on  keeping  his  street  corner  clear.  Go  up  to  any  man  with  a  gold 
cable  swung  across  his  chest  and  ask  gently,  "O  s'nhor  tern  a  hora?" 
and  he  is  almost  as  apt  as  not  to  reply  with  a  mumbled,  "Ah-er-I 
cannot  tell  you  the  time,"  meanwhile  grasping  first  one  end  of  the 
chain,  then  the  other,  as  if  he  were  striving  to  convince  even  himself 
that  he  has  a  watch  somewhere  attached  to  it. 

It  was  midwinter  in  Rio,  yet  plump,  sun-browned  youths  rolled  in 
the  surf  each  morning  below  the  wall  of  her  chief  driveway  and  lolled 
in  the  shade  of  the  open-air  cafes  along  it.  Even  in  July  the  lower 
levels  of  the  city  can  be  unpleasantly  hot,  which  makes  it  all  the  more 
remarkable  that  it  gives  such  an  impression  of  energy  during  its  busi- 
ness hours.  From  the  wharves  to  the  edges  of  the  mainly  residential 
sections  the  place  pulsates  with  perspiring  activity,  though  on  closer 
inspection  one  suspects  that  the  Fluminense  is  more  energetic  at  play 
than  in  productive  labor.  V/hatever  his  exertions,  however,  he  di- 
vides them  into  short  sections  separated  by  the  partaking  of  coffee. 
All  along  the  Avenida,  in  every  downtov/n  street  of  importance,  there 
is  not  a  block  without  its  coffee-house,  a  cool  room  filled  with  marble- 
topped  tables  on  a  damp,  sawdusted  floor,  into  which  one  steps  from 
the  heated  street,  silently  turns  upright  one  of  the  score  of  tiny  cups 
on  the  table  before  one,  fills  it  half  full  of  sugar,  raps  on  the  table 
with  the  head  of  one's  "stick"  until  a  silent  waiter  comes  and  fills  what 
is  left  of  the  cup  with  black  coffee,  which  one  slowly  sips  and,  dropping 


AT  LARGK  IN  RIO  DE  JANEIRO  i79 

a  tostdo,  a  nickel   loo-reis  piece,  beside  the  empty  tasa,  wanders  un 
down  the  street — to  repeat  the  process  within  the  next  few  blocks. 

Rut  with  sunset,  at  least  durini^  vvliat  Rio  likes  to  refer  to  as  winter, 
the  temperature  grows  delightful,  and  it  is  from  ihen  on  until  a  new 
day  warms  again  that  one  gets  tiie  full  tropical  fragrance,  the  un- 
northern  dolce  far  nientc  that  makes  the  Brazilian  capital  so  enticing 
to  the  wandering  stranger.  The  newcomer  soon  learns  to  stay  up  most 
of  the  night  and  enjoy  the  best  part  of  the  day.  Not  even  Paris  was 
ever  more  brilliantly  lighted  than  downtown  Rio — cynics  whisper 
that  the  city  fathers  have  a  close  personal  interest  in  public  lighting — 
not  even  Parisian  boulevards  are  more  scented  than  the  Avenida  and  its 
adjacent  streets  with  the  pungent  odor  of  mercenary  love.  Far  into 
the  night  the  Avenida  pulsates;  long  after  the  theaters  and  countless 
cinemas,  and  the  opera  in  its  season,  have  ended,  the  surge  of  hu- 
manity  continues,  punctuated  at  all  too  frequent  intervals  by  that 
most  distinctive  sound  of  the  night  life  of  Rio, — bass-voiced  newsboys 
singsonging  their  papers— "A  Rua !"  "A  Noite  !"— in  the  distressingly 
German  guttural  peculiar  to  the  native  tongue  as  spoken  in  the  Bra- 
zilian capital. 

Larger  in  extent  than  Paris,  broken  everywhere  by  savage,  rocky, 
wooded  niorros — virgin-jungled  hills  rising  in  the  very  heart  of  town 
and  which,  peeled  of  their  thick  scalp  of  vegetation,  prove  to  be  of 
solid  granite — stretching  away  in  great  green  mounds  and  ranges  stand- 
ing high  into  the  peerless  tropical  sky,  Rio  was  as  entrancing  as  Buenos 
Aires  is  commonplace.  The  level  parts  of  the  city  were  flat  indeed, 
flat  as  if  the  sea  had  washed  in  its  debris  until  it  had  filled  all  the 
spaces  between  the  rocky  island  hills,  and  then  completely  flooded 
those  valleys  with  houses.  Nor  did  the  building  stop  there.  Seeping 
everywhere  into  the  interstices  of  its  hills,  the  town  was  here  and 
there  chopped  back  into  them,  or,  if  the  nwrros  set  sheer  rock  faces 
against  the  intrusion,  it  climbed  upon  and  over  them,  until  its  many- 
colored  houses  lay  heaped  into  the  sky  or  spilled  down  great  gorges 
and  valleys  beyond.  Then  always,  from  whatever  point  of  vantage 
one  saw  it,  the  scene  was  backed  by  its  peerless  sky-line, — the  Pico 
de  Gavea  with  its  square  head,  like  a  topsail  or  the  conventional  sym- 
bol for  a  workingman's  cap;  the  "Sleeping  Giant,"  showing  nature's 
most  fantastic  carving;  hollow-chested  Corcovado,  the  "Hunchback." 
peering  amusedly  down  upon  puny  man  playing  ant  in  and  out  among 
the  tumbled  rocks  below;  the  admirable  "Sugar  Loaf,"  keeping  eter- 
nal watch  over  the  entrance  to  the  bay,  the  ridges  and  wooded  sum- 


i8o  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

mits  of  Tijuca  backed  far  off  by  the  "Organ"  range,  protruding  like 
broken  columns  above  the  distant  horizon.  "Vedete  Napoli  e  poi 
mori"  might  with  many  times  more  justice  be  said  of  Rio. 

It  was  always  a  wonder  to  me  how  the  citizens  of  the  Brazilian 
capital  succeeded  in  keeping  within  doors  long  enough  to  do  their  daily 
tasks.  Day  or  night  its  peerless  scenery  and  glorious  climate  were  in- 
viting one  to  come  out  and  play,  to  forget  the  commonplace  things 
of  life.  A  local  editor  complained  that  the  people  of  Rio  do  not  read 
in  the  street-cars,  "as  our  neighbors  do  in  the  United  States,  but  spend 
their  time  gazing  about  them  and  thus  lose  much  opportunity  for  cul- 
ture." Probably  he  had  never  been  in  New  York  or  Chicago,  or  he 
would  have  realized  that  sometimes  people  read  during  their  urban 
travels  to  keep  their  minds  off  the  "scenery."  In  Rio  nature  and  all 
outdoors  are  so  much  more  splendid  than  any  printed  page  that  read- 
ing seems  a  sacrilege.  Though  I  rode  along  the  Beira  Mar  a  dozen 
times  a  day,  I  never  succeeded  in  withholding  my  eyes  from  the  scene 
about  me ;  never  was  I  able  to  miss  a  chance  to  gaze  across  the  bay  to 
Nictheroy,  or  up  at  the  silhouettes  of  Corcovado  and  Tijuca ;  like  a 
great  painting  it  grew  upon  one  with  every  view. 

I  passed  frequently  along  this  most  marvelous  boulevard  in  the 
western  hemisphere,  Beira  Mar,  the  "Edge  of  the  Sea,"  stretching  for 
miles  along  the  harbor's  edge  so  close  that  the  ocean  spills  over  upon 
it  on  days  when  it  is  brava.  Between  the  shady  Passeio  Publico  be- 
hind the  Monroe  Palace  and  the  heroic  statue  of  Cabral  on  the  green 
Largo  da  Gloria,  the  foothills  crowd  in  so  closely  that  there  is  room 
for  only  one  street  to  pass,  and  right  of  way  is  naturally  given  to  the 
chief  pride  of  the  city.  Here  converge  the  pleasure  seeking  traffic 
and  the  business  bent,  to  split  again  presently  on  the  rocky  Morro  da 
Gloria,  crowned  by  its  quaint  little  medieval  church,  the  one  stream 
to  hurry  away  through  the  Rua  do  Cattete,  the  other  to  follow  with 
more  leisure  the  serpentine  Beira  Mar.  This,  lined  by  splendid 
trees  and  pretentious  residences  on  the  land  side,  outflanks  another 
rocky  hill  that  would  cut  it  off  by  passing  between  walls  of  man- 
scarred  granite  behind  it,  skirts  another  arm  of  the  turquoise-green 
harbor,  with  a  closer  view  of  the  gigantic  "Sugar  Loaf,"  and  then 
bursts  out  through  a  long  tunnel  upon  the  ocean  front  where  marvel- 
ous beaches  and  a  succession  of  boulevards  continue  for  miles  through 
what  is  rapidly  developing  into  the  finest  residential  section  of  the 
Brazilian  capital. 

The  Beira  Mar  is  the  show-place  of  Rio  and  of  Brazil.    It  is  some- 


AT  LARGE  IN  RIO  DE  JANEIRO  i8i 

times  as  if  one  were  asked  to  admire  a  costume  without  seeing  more 
than  the  lace  along  the  hottom,  the  eagerness  of  its  people  to  impress 
the  visitor  witli  the  undoubted  splendor  of  this  glorious  seaside  drive- 
way. Yet  there  are  many  other  strips  and  corners  of  the  city  tliat  are 
well-nigh  as  sumptuous  or  as  picturesque;  the  difficulty  is  to  hunt 
them  out  among  the  morros  and  foothills  that  everywhere  divide  the 
capital  into  almost  isolated  districts.  Walking  is  all  very  well,  but 
perspiration  flows  quickly  and  copiously  in  Rio,  and  a  perpetually 
drenched  shirt  is  not  entirely  conducive  to  pleasure ;  and  the  city  is 
so  incredibly  extensive  that  even  tramw'ay  exploration  becomes  seri- 
ous to  the  man  with  a  weak  financial  constitution.  There  are  two 
street-car  systems  and  they  operate  what  is  perhaps  the  best  surface 
system  in  the  world ;  but  it  is  also  the  most  expensive.  Take  a  street- 
car ride  from  one  end  of  Rio  to  another  and  back  and  you  have  spent, 
thanks  to  the  "zone  system"  imported  from  Europe,  the  equivalent 
of  half  a  dollar;  and  as  there  are  lines  out  through  all  the  score  or 
more  of  gaps  between  the  hills  and  morros,  I  quickly  made  the  dis- 
covery that  if  I  attempted  to  explore  all  the  city,  even  by  street-car, 
I  should  probably  have  the  privilege  of  swimming  home. 

What  was  my  joy,  therefore,  to  learn  that  the  superintendent  of 
the  "Botanical  Garden  Line,"  which  covers  all  the  more  beautiful 
half  of  Rio,  came  from  the  town  in  which  I  had  spent  much  of  my 
boyhood.  I  had  long  wanted  the  experience  of  being  a  street-car  con- 
ductor or  motorman,  and  made  application  at  once.  My  fellow-towns- 
man hesitated  to  give  me  any  such  place  of  responsibility  unless  I 
would  agree  to  stay  for  some  time,  but  he  was  quite  ready  to  appoint 
me  a  fiscal  segreto  of  the  system  under  his  charge,  at  the  most  munifi- 
cent salary  I  had  ever  drawn  in  my  life — six  thousand  a  day!  That 
was  exactly  enough  to  pay  for  my  room  and  board  in  the  German 
hotel  of  the  Rua  do  Acre ;  still  it  was  decidedly  better  to  be  paid  for 
riding  about  town  than  to  have  to  pay  for  that  privilege,  and  with  my 
living  and  transportation  assured  until  I  sailed  my  chief  problems 
were  solved. 

The  "Botanical  Garden  Line"  begins  at  the  principal  hotel  on  the 
Avenida  Central,  about  which  every  car  loops  before  setting  forth 
again  on  its  journey  to  some  part  of  that  section  of  Rio  most  worth 
seeing.  I  was  furnished  a  book  of  free  tickets  and  had  only  to  tnke 
a  back  seat  on  any  of  these  cars  and,  while  reading  a  newspaper  or 
seeing  the  scenery  as  inconspicuously  as  possible,  casually  notice 
v.-hether  the  conductor  showed  an  inclination  to  forget  to  ring  up  fares 


i82  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

or  to  break  any  other  of  the  strict  rules  of  the  company.  My  tickets 
were  good  only  for  the  oceanside  half  of  town,  for  though  they  were 
under  the  same  North  American  ownership  the  two  car  systems  did  not 
connect,  and  anyone  traveling  all  the  way  through  town  must  walk 
a  block  from  the  hotel  loop  to  the  cars  of  the  business  section.  This, 
however,  was  more  compact  and  less  interesting  to  the  casual  visi- 
tor than  the  region  in  which  I  had  been  given  free  transportation. 

I  was  frequently  seen  thereafter  boarding  a  "bonde  da  Light"  at  the 
Avenida  hotel,  or  alighting  from  one  after  a  long  journey  seaward. 
The  company  was  officially  known  as  the  "Light  and  Pov,^er,"  whence 
the  abbreviation  of  ownership;  and  as  the  first  electric  street-cars 
introduced  into  Brazil  were  financed  by  bonds  that  were  offered  for 
sale  to  the  Brazilians  with  much  advertising,  and  there  was  no  other 
term  for  them  in  the  national  vocabulary,  the  street-cars  that  finally 
came  were  dubbed  "bonds,"  and  so  they  remain  to  this  day,  except 
that,  as  the  Brazilian,  like  all  Latins,  cannot  pronounce  a  word  sharply 
cut  off  in  a  consonant,  he  usually  calls  them  "bondes,"  in  two  syllables. 
The  "bondes"  of  Rio  are  as  excellent  as  those  to  be  found  anywhere 
on  the  globe,  particularly  on  the  more  aristocratic  "Botanical  Garden 
Line."     Naturally,  when  a  street-car  company  can  get  a  quarter  for 
a  ride  across  town  it  can  afford  to  maintain  the  best  of  service.     The 
cars  are  all  open,  there  are  five  persons,  and  five  only,  to  a  seat,  smok- 
ing is  allowed  on  all  but  the  first  three  benches,  and  the  law  forbids 
those  not  properly  dressed  to  ride  in  the  first-class  cars,  there  being 
second-class  trailers  for  workmen  and  the  collarless  at  certain  hours 
of  the  day,  on  which  those  carrying  bundles  larger  than  a  portfolio 
are  also  obliged  to  travel.     Street-cars,  like  every  other  enterprise  in 
Brazil,  carry  a  heavy  incubus  of  official  "deadheads"  and  politicians. 
Soldiers,    sailors,    gasmen,    mailmen,    customhouse    employees,    street 
lighters,  policemen,  and  a  dozen  other  types  in  uniform  ride  free  by 
crowding  upon  the  back  platform.    They  are  not  allowed  seats,  as  are 
the  swarms  of  politicians  with  elaborately  engraved  yearly  passes — 
which  they  consider  it  beneath  their  dignity  to  be  asked  to  show ;  but 
with  those  exceptions  there  are  no  "standees."     Law,  custom,  natural 
politeness  and  the  lack  of  haste  of  the  Brazilian  are  all  against  per- 
mitting a  person  to  crowd  into  a  filled  car,  no  matter  what  the  provo- 
cation.    Laws  are  not  always  obeyed  to  the  letter  in  the  liberty-license 
atmosphere  of  South  America's  most  recent  convert  to  republicanism, 
but  during  all  my  stay  in  Brazil  I  never  saw  a  passenger  atte  npt  to 
board  a  full  street-car. 


AT  LARGE  IN  RIO  DE  JANEIRO  183 

I  am  compelled  to  admit  that  the  street-car  conductors  of  Rio  are 
superior  to  our  own  in  courtesy  and  their  equal  in  attendinj^f  strictly 
to  business,  and  that  the  "Light"  probably  gets  as  large  a  percentage 
of  its  fares  as  does  the  average  line  in  the  United  States.  In  spite  of  my 
duty  as  secret  inspector  I  was  utterly  unable  to  find  any  serious  fault 
with  them,  thanks  perhaps  to  long  and  strict  American  discipline, 
for  there  was  a  great  difference  between  their  staid,  careful  manner 
and  the  annoying  tomfoolery  of  the  more  youthful  collectors  on  the 
native-owned  motor-busses  along  the  Avenida  and  out  the  Beira  Mar. 
Part  of  this  result,  perhaps,  was  accomplished  by  a  regular  system 
of  increase  in  wages  and  a  gold  star  on  the  sleeve  for  each  five  years 
as  inducements  to  longevity  in  the  service.  The  Brazilian  is  noted  for 
his  inability  to  protest  against  exploitation,  but  he  is  very  touchy  as  to 
the  manner  in  which  he  is  asked  to  pay,  which  is  perhaps  the  reason 
the  conductors  of  Rio  never  say  "fares,  please,"  but  only  rattle  sug- 
gestively the  coins  in  their  pockets  as  they  swing  from  pillar  to  post 
along  the  car.  Nor  have  we  ever  reached  the  level  of  masculine  dain- 
tiness of  the  Brazilian  capital,  where  young  dandies  carry  little  mesh 
purses  worthy  of  a  chorus-girl,  from  which  they  affectedly  pick  out 
their  street-car  fare,  dropping  the  coins  from  well  above  the  recipient 
palm  in  order  to  avoid  personal  contact  with  the  vulgarly  calloused 
hand  of  labor. 

Most  of  the  lines  of  the  "Botanical  Garden"  system  are  so  long 
that  three  or  four  round  trips  a  day  was  all  I  could,  or  was  ex- 
pected to,  make ;  moreover,  I  was  instructed  not  to  return  by  the  same 
car  that  carried  me  out  between  Rio's  hills  to  the  end  of  the  line,  lest 
I  betray  my  calling.  Thus  I  was  forced  to  visit  every  nook  and  corner 
of  half  the  capital  in  the  natural  discharge  of  my  duties.  The  Bo- 
tanical Gardens  for  which  the  system  was  named,  lay  far  out  on  the 
edge  of  the  salty  Lagoa  Rodrigo  de  Freitas,  a  marvelous  collection 
of  tropical  and  semi-tropical  flora.  Yet  this  was  made  almost  inconspic- 
uous by  its  setting,  for  all  Rio  is  a  marvelous  botanical  garden. 
Greater  wealth  of  vegetation  has  been  granted  no  other  city  of  the 
world,  so  far  as  I  know  it.  Date  palms,  cocoanut  palms,  a  multi- 
tude of  other  varieties,  each  more  beautiful  than  the  other,  grew  in 
profusion  down  to  the  very  edge  of  the  sea,  all  to  be  in  turn  outdone 
by  the  peerless  royal  palm.  They  call  it  the  "imperial  palm"  in  Brazil, 
because  Joao  VI  of  Portugal,  first  European  emperor  to  cross  the  sea 
to  reign  in  his  American  domain,  to  which  he  fled  before  the  con- 
quering Napoleon,  ca»vsed  this  monarch  of  trees  to  be  brought  from 


iS4  WORKING  NORTH  FRO^^I  PATAGONIA 

the  West  Indies,  and  decreed  that  all  seeds  that  could  not  be  used  by 
the  royal  family  should  be  burned,  lest  they  fall  into  the  hands  of 
the  common  people.  Slaves  stole  the  surplus  turned  over  to  ihem  for 
destruction,  however,  and  sold  them  to  any  who  cared  to  buy,  so  tha^ 
to-day  the  imperial  palm  is  the  crowning  glory  of  nature  along  all 
the  coast  of  Brazil.  In  Rio  it  is  never  absent  from  the  picture.  It 
grows  in  the  courtyards  of  corticos,  those  one-story  tenement  blocks 
of  the  Brazilian  capital,  and  in  the  patios  of  decaying  mansions  of  for- 
mer Portuguese  grandees ;  it  stretches  in  long  double  rows  up  many 
a  street  and  private  driveway ;  it  shades  the  humblest  hovels  and 
the  most  pompous  villas  of  the  newly  rich  with  that  perfection  of  im- 
partiality which  only  nature  attains ;  it  thrusts  itself  forth  from  be- 
tween the  rocks  along  the  seashore  wherever  waves  or  wind  have 
carried  a  bit  of  sustaining  soil ;  it  clusters  in  deeply  shaded  valleys  and 
climbs  to  the  summits  of  the  encircling  mountains,  there  to  stand  out 
in  regal  isolation  above  the  tangle  of  tropical  creepers  and  impenetrable 
jungle  that  is  constantly  threatening  to  invade  the  tiny  kingdom  of 
puny  man  below.  This  great  city-dwelling  forest  is  one  of  the  chief 
charms  of  the  Brazilian  capital.  It  seems  to  grasp  the  city  in  its  pow- 
erful embrace,  now  affectionately,  as  if  its  only  purpose  were  to  beau- 
tify it,  sometimes,  as  if  bent  on  thrusting  man  back  into  the  sea  from 
whence  he  came,  insinuating  itself  into  every  open  space,  spreading 
along  every  street  like  the  files  of  a  conquering  army,  invading  the 
parks  and  the  interior  courts  of  houses,  where  marble  pavements  in 
mosaics  of  bright  colors  gleam  amid  great  masses  of  jungle  flowers, 
gigantic  cool  ferns,  and  fragrant  orange-trees,  overtopped  by  the 
mai'estically  rustling  imperial  palm.  It  is  illegal  to  cut  down  a  tree 
within  the  limits  of  Rio,  and  the  forest  makes  the  most  of  its  immunity 
by  crowding  the  heels  of  the  human  creatures  who  soft-heartedly  spare 
it;  trees,  shrubs,  bushes,  lianas,  creepers,  a  veritable  tidal  wave  of 
forest  and  jungle  sweeps  from  the  edge  of  the  sea  to  the  summits 
of  the  encircling  hills,  like  multitudes  gone  to  demand  of  the  sun  the 
renev/al  of  their  strength  and  energy. 

My  job  took  me  out  through  older  avenues  lined  with  portentous 
dwellings  dating  back  to  colonial  days ;  it  dropped  me  with  time  to 
spare  beside  little  pragas,  slumbering  in  the  sunshine  beneath  rustling 
fronds,  that  carried  the  mind  back  to  old  Portugal,  or  at  the  foot 
of  streets  which  ran  up  narrowing  valleys  until  they  encountered  sheer 
impassable  wooded  hillsides ;  it  left  me  at  the  beginning  of  rows  of 
houses  of  every  conceivable  color,  shape,  and  situation,  which  twisted 


AT  LARGE  IN  RIO  DE  JANEIRO  185 

t':cir  way  up  gullies  or  draped  themselves  over  the  lower  flanks  of 
vlie  hills,  some  seeming  ready  to  fall  at  the  first  gust  of  wind,  some 
tucked  immovably  into  evergreen  tropical  settings,  the  loftiest  over- 
topped only  by  the  imperial  palms  or  by  the  mountains  in  the  far 
i;ackground.  So  swift  are  many  of  these  byways  of  Rio  that  a  street- 
lamp  in  the  next  block  is  sometimes  well  above  the  moon ;  so  closely 
are  nature  and  man  crowded  together  that  there  is  absolute  primeval 
v.ilderness  within  half  an  hour's  walk  of  the  Avenida  central,  and 
one  may  come  upon  clusters  of  jungle  cabins  lost  in  the  bucolic  calm 
of  the  virgin  tnatta  almost  in  the  heart  of  the  city  limits. 

Some  of  our  lines  passed  through  long  dark  tunnels  bored  in  the 
granite  hills,  to  reach  one  or  another  of  those  pretty,  seaside  towns 
that  make  up  the  outskirts  of  Rio.  One  ran  the  full  length  of  Copaca- 
bana  with  its  mile  upon  mile  of  peerless  beach  directly  facing  the  At- 
lantic a  short  square  back  of  the  main  street ;  still  others  hurried  on 
and  on  through  suburbs  that  scarcely  realized  they  were  part  of  the 
city.  There  was  Ipanema,  for  instance,  where  the  track  was  lined 
more  often  than  not  with  uninhabited  cactus  desert,  the  car  breaking 
out  every  little  while  from  behind  a  hill  upon  the  welcome  perpetual 
sea  breeze,  or  passing  scattered  shanties  bearing  such  pathetically 
amusing  names  as  "Casa  Paz  e  Amor,"  or  "A  Felicidade  da  V'iuvinha,*' 
with  a  goat  and  a  few  hens  scratching  in  the  beach  sand  before  them. 
The  Ipanema  line  was  particularly  attractive,  for  it  ran  so  far  out  that 
I  could  take  a  dip  in  the  sea  between  inspecting  trips  without  going' 
to  the  expense  of  acquiring  a  bathing-suit. 

Many  a  visitor  to  Brazil  has  returned  home  convinced  that  her  capi- 
tal has  no  slums.  It  is  an  error  natural  to  those  who  do  not  stay  long 
or  climb  high  enough.  The  traveler  who  subsidizes  the  exertions  of  a 
pair  of  chauffeurs  or  who  scuffs  his  soles  along  the  mosaics  of  the 
Avenida  Rio  Branco,  justly  admiring  the  Theatro  Municipal  for  all 
its  imitation  of  the  Paris  Opera,  admitting  that  the  Escola  de  Bellas 
Artes  and  the  Bibliotheca  Nacional  are  worthy  of  their  setting,  and 
that  the  Ecira  Mar  and  the  seascape  beyond  are  unrivaled,  often  leaves 
without  so  much  as  suspecting  that  there  is  a  seamy  side  to  this  en- 
trancing picture,  that  he  who  has  seen  Rio  only  on  the  level  knows 
but  half  of  it.  Indeed,  even  the  leisurely  wanderer  who  covers  the 
entire  network  of  tram-lines  within  the  city  has  by  no  means  com- 
pleted his  sight-seeing;  to  do  so  he  must  frequently  strike  out  afoot 
and  climb. 

For  the  slums  of  Rio  are  on  the  tops  of  her  morros,  those  rock 


i86  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

hills  which,  each  bearing  its  own  musically  cadenced  name,  rise  every- 
where above  the  general  level.  The  Carioca — the  inhabitant  of  Rio 
is  more  apt  to  call  himself  by  this  name  than  by  the  more  formal  term 
Fluminense — hates  physical  exertion  such  as  the  climbing  of  hills,  and 
the  flat  places  of  the  city  are  in  high  demand  for  residential  as  well  as 
business  sites.  A  few  sumptuous  villas  clamber  a  little  way  up  them 
within  automobile  reach,  but  the  upper  flanks  and  summits  of  the 
morros  are  left  to  the  discards  of  fortune.  Here  the  poorer  classes 
congregate,  to  build  their  shacks  and  huts  of  anything  available, — 
fragments  of  dry  goods  boxes,  flattened  out  oil  cans,  the  leaf  base  of 
the  royal  palm — every  shape  and  description  of  thrown-together  hovels, 
inhabited  by  washerwomen,  street  hawkers,  petty  merchants,  dock  la- 
borers, minor  criminals,  victims  of  misfortune,  and  habitual  loafers. 
Barely  two  blocks  back  of  the  justly  admired  Municipal  Theater  there 
rises  such  a  hill,  so  densely  crowded  with  makeshift  dwellings  that 
only  men  of  moderate  girth  can  pass  comfortably  along  the  dirt  paths 
between  them;  it  would  take  a  persistent  walker  weeks  to  investigate 
all  the  other  congested  hilltop  towns  within  the  city.  There  the  stroller 
from  below  finds  himself  in  quite  another  world  than  the  Avenida  at 
his  feet,  a  world  whose  inhabitants  stare  half-surprised,  half-resent- 
fully  at  the  man  with  even  a  near-white  collar,  yet  many  of  whom 
have  such  a  view  from  the  doors  of  their  decrepit  shanties  and  such  a 
sea  breeze  through  the  cracks  in  their  patchwork  walls  as  the  most 
fortune-favored  of  other  lands  may  well  envy. 

These  scores  of  morros  rising  above  Rio's  well-to-do  level  are  of 
many  shapes,  some  only  a  little  less  abrupt  and  striking  than  the  "Sugar 
Loaf"  at  th.e  harbor's  entrance,  others  great  rounded  knolls  over  which 
the  town  has  spread  like  fantastic  unbroken  jungle,  those  in  the  older 
part  of  town  terminating  in  feudal  looking  castles  or  former  monas- 
teries turned  to  modern  republican  use,  some  of  them  so  high  that 
the  sounds  of  the  traffic  and  the  trafficking  below  are  drowned  out  by 
the  hilarity  of  negro  boys  rolling  about  the  dusty  shade  in  old  frock 
coats  and  what  were  once  spotless  afternoon  trousers,  gleaned  from 
the  discard  of  the  city  beneath.  There  are  white  people  living  on  the 
summits  of  the  morros, — recent  immigrants,  ne'er-do-wells  of  the 
type  known  as  "white  trash"  in  our  South — but  easily  four  out  of  every 
five  of  the  hilltop  inhabitants  are  of  the  African  race,  and  he  who 
thinks  the  negro  is  the  equal  of  the  white  man  under  equality  of  op- 
portunity should  climb  these  slum-ridden  hills  and  see  how  persistently 
the  blacks  have  risen  to  the  top  in  Rio,  though  there  is  so  slight  a 


AT  LARGE  IN  RIO  DE  JANEIRO  187 

prejudice  against  the  negro  in  Brazil  that  his  failure  to  gain  an  emi- 
nence in  society  similar  to  his  physical  elevation  must  be  just  his  own 
fault.  It  is  chiefly  from  her  hilltops,  too,  that  come  what  Rio  calls 
her  gente  de  tamanco,  wearers  of  the  wooden-clog  soles  with  canvas 
slipper  tops  which  are  the  habitual  footwear  of  the  poorer  sockless 
Cariocas.  The  falsetto  scrape  of  tamancos  on  the  cement  pavements 
is  the  most  characteristic  sound  of  the  Brazilian  capital,  as  native  to 
it  as  its  perpetual  sea  breeze  and  its  sky-piercing  palmeiras  imperiaes. 

It  was  dusty  on  the  morros  at  the  time  of  my  "slumming,"  for  Rio 
was  suffering  from  what  the  authoritative  "oldest  inhabitant"  called 
the  worst  drought  in  forty  years,  and  long  lines  of  the  hill-top  in- 
habitants were  constantly  laboring  upward  with  former  oil  cans  full 
of  water  on  their  heads.  The  shortage  of  water  had  grown  so  serious 
that  even  down  on  the  level  the  supply  was  shut  off  from  dark  until 
daylight;  the  ponds  in  the  Praga  da  Republica  and  similar  parks  were 
so  low  that  the  wild  animals  living  there  in  a  natural  state  of  freedom 
were  in  danger  of  choking  to  death.  But  hardships  are  familiar  to 
the  people  of  the  hilltops,  and  there  was  an  air  of  cheerfulness,  al- 
most of  hilarity,  about  the  long  row  of  public  spigfots  on  the  Largo 
da  Carioca  behind  the  Avenida  Hotel  at  the  end  of  the  old  Portuguese 
aqueduct,  to  which  the  morro  dwellers  descended  for  their  water, 
as  slaves  once  carried  from  the  same  spot  the  supply  for  all  the  city. 

The  unavoidable  excursion  for  all  visitors  to  Rio  is,  of  course,  the 
ascen^  of  the  "Sugar  Loaf."  For  centuries  after  the  discovery  of 
Brazil  and  the  founding  by  Mem  da  Sa  of  the  village  of  Sao  Sebastiao 
at  the  mouth  of  the  putative  "River  of  January"  this  enormous  granite 
thumb,  its  sides  so  sheer  that  they  give  no  foothold  even  to  aggressive 
tropical  vegetation,  was  considered  unscalable.  But  in  time  this,  like 
so  many  of  mankind's  impressions,  was  proved  false  and  by  the  mid- 
dle of  the  last  century  it  had  evidently  become  a  favorite  feat  to 
salute  the  city  from  the  summit  of  the  Pao  d'Assucar.  At  any  rate, 
in  running  through  an  old  file  of  the  Jornal  do  Commcrcio  at  the 
National  Library  I  found  in  a  number  dated  "Corte  e  Nitherohy, 
December  8,  1877,"  among  many  appeals  to  "His  Gracious  Majesty  in 
the  shadow  of  whose  throne  we  all  take  refuge,"  the  following  item: 

This  morning  the  American  Senhores — here  followed  four  American  names — set 
out  at  S  A.M.  and  climbed  to  the  top  of  our  Pao  d'.\ssucar,  arriving  at  7:11.  This 
climbing  of  the  Sugar  Loaf  is  getting  so  frequent  that  before  long  no  doubt  someone 
will  be  asking  for  a  concession  for  a  line  of  bonds  to  that  locality. 


i88  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

The  writer,  of  course,  considered  this  the  height  of  sarcasm,  and 
a  clever  thought  improved  by  its  connection  with  the  burning  question 
of  the  hour,  for  in  the  same  issue  there  was  a  notice  that  more  street- 
car bonds  were  about  to  be  offered  for  sale,  and  the  sheet  was  strewn 
with  complaints  against  the  "Botanical  Garden  Rail  Road,  which  is 
not  hving  up  to  the  concession  which  His  Gracious  Majesty  was 
pleased  to  grant  it  in  1856,  but  is  oppressing  the  people  of  this  Court 
for  the  benefit  of  a  heartless  corporation."  Yet  if  that  particular 
scribe  were  permitted  to  peer  out  for  a  moment  from  the  after  world 
of  newspaper  writers  he  would  find  that  his  bon  mot  has  entirely  lost 
its  sting,  for  that  is  exactly  what  someone  has  done,  and  to-day  there 
is  a  line  of  "bonds"  to  the  top  of  the  "Sugar  Loaf." 

Traveling  out  to  the  end  of  the  Beira  Mar,  continuing  on  around 
the  harbor  instead  of  dashing  through  one  of  the  tunnels  leading  out 
tipon  the  open  Atlantic,  one  comes  to  a  station  beyond  the  Ministry 
of  Agriculture — set  on  this  rocky  neck  of  land,  no  doubt,  so  that  the 
ministers  may  have  a  constant  sea  breeze  and  catch  no  scent  of  the 
tilling  of  soil.  On  the  way  the  massive  Pao  d'Assucar,  here  sug- 
gestive rather  of  a  loaf  of  French  bread  stood  on  end,  grows  more 
and  more  gigantic,  the  long  span  of  cable  to  the  summit  swinging 
across  the  sky  like  a  cobweb,  and  the  timid  have  often  been  known  to 
turn  back  at  this  point  rather  than  risk  their  lives  in  the  aerial  jour- 
ney before  them.  There  are  many  of  these  striking  forms  of  granite 
monoliths  along  the  coast  of  Brazil,  though  of  them  all  Rio's  "Sugar 
Loaf"  is  probably  the  most  dramatic.  The  cable  tram  had  been  in 
operation  about  a  year,  the  company  being  Brazilian  and  the  machinery 
German.  At  the  station  visitors  are  sold  tickets  at  once — after  which 
they  are  incessantly  pestered  by  hangers-on  of  the  company  to  buy 
beer  and  the  like  at  the  station  cafe  until  a  car  is  ready  for  the  journey. 
The  conveyance  is  similar  to  a  small  closed  tramcar,  with  wire-grated 
windows,  the  end  ones  open,  a  locked  door,  and  benches  on  two  sides, 
except  that  instead  of  having  wheels  beneath  there  are  rollers  above, 
which  run  on  two  cables  of  about  two  inches  in  diameter.  Sliding 
smoothly  upward  at  nearly  a  45-degree  angle,  the  first  car  carried  us 
to  the  top  of  a  rock  hill  called  the  Penedo  da  Urea,  220  meters  high, 
where  we  were  let  out  to  walk  a  few  hundred  yards — and  given  ample 
opportunity  to  quiet  our  nerves  with  beer  and  sandwiches.  From  this 
another  car  swung  us  across  the  bottomless  wooded  chasm  between, 
the  two  peaks  on  a  cable  that  sagged  considerably  of  its  own  weight 


AT  LARGE  IN  RIO  DK  JANEIRO  189 

and  set  us  down  on  the  bald  rock  top  of  the  Pao  d'Assucar,   1250 
feet  above  the  sea. 

At  this  late  afternoon  hour  the  "Sugar  Loaf"  casts  its  own  shadow 
far  out  across  the  entrance  to  the  harbor.  The  city  is  apt  to  be  a 
bit  hazy,  the  sun,  or  the  moon,  often  just  red  blotches  in  the  dusty  air 
in  time  of  drought,  but  its  hills  and  the  countless  islands  of  the  bay 
seem  solid  rocks  with  woolly  wigs  of  forest  and  jungle.  The  ferry 
crawling  across  the  bay  to  Nictheroy,  ocean-going  steamers  creeping  in 
and  out  of  the  harbor,  leave  their  paths  sharp  cut  and  clear  behind 
them  as  the  trail  of  a  comet  shooting  across  the  sky.  Almost  directly 
below,  the  Morro  Cara  de  Cao  ("Dog's  Face")  stretches  upward  in 
a  futile  effort  to  rival  the  giant  above.  On  its  projecting  nose  the 
Fortaleza  Sao  Joao  faces  that  of  Santa  Cruz,  inaccessible  on  the 
Nictheroy  side  opposite,  midway  between  them  is  a  little  island  bear- 
ing the  Fortaleza  da  Lage,  and  still  farther  in,  completing  the  quartet  of 
watchdogs  that  guard  the  entrance  to  Brazil's  chief  harbor,  lies  the  for- 
tified island  of  Villegaignon,  named  for  the  Frenchman  who  once  in- 
stalled his  forces  here  and  disputed  possession  of  the  bay  with  Mem 
da  Sa.  One  can  look  as  directly  down  into  every  activity  of  Sao 
Joao  Fortress  as  from  an  airplane,  the  roll  of  drums  rising  half-muffled 
to  the  ears  as  tiny  ants  of  soldiers,  driUing  in  squads,  take  minutes  to 
march  across  the  two-inch  parade  ground.  As  the  sun  goes  down  be- 
hind the  bandage  of  clouds  along  the  lower  horizon,  the  scene  clears 
somewhat  of  its  bluish  dust-and-heat  haze  and  discloses  the  myriad 
details  of  the  vast  spreading  city,  strewn  in  and  out  among  its  morros 
until  it  resembles  some  fantastic  and  gigantic  spider.  Evening  de- 
scends with  indescribable  softness,  the  world  fading  away  out  of 
sight  through  a  gamut  of  all  known  shades  of  color,  the  wash  of  the 
sea  on  a  score  of  sandy  beaches  and  on  the  bases  of  rocky  islands  and 
hills  coming  up  like  hushed  celestial  music.  Then  a  light  springs  out 
of  the  void,  another  and  another,  quickly  yet  so  gradually  as  to  seem 
part  of  nature's  processes,  until  at  length  all  the  city  and  its  suburban 
beach  towns,  the  very  warships  in  the  harbor,  are  outlined  in  twinkling 
lights — for  each  and  all  of  them  do  distinctly  twinkle — like  sparkling 
gems  of  .some  fantastically  shaped  garment  of  dark-blue  stuff,  of 
which  nothing  else  is  seen  but  the  dim  jagged  silhouette  of  the  mountain 
background,  whence  blows  the  caressing  air  of  evening.  .  .  .  But 
only  the  foolhardy  would  attempt  to  paint  such  scenes  in  words;  like 
all  the  regal  beauties  of  Rio  they  reveal  themselves  only  to  those  who 
come  to  look  upon  them  in  person. 


190  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Yet  there  are  many  who  regard  the  view  from  the  Corcovado  as 
still  more  striking.  The  "Hunchback,"  rising  a  thousand  feet  higher 
than  the  "Sugar  Loaf,"  leaning  over  the  city  as  if  it  were  half-amused, 
half-disgusted  by  the  activities  of  the  tiny  beings  below,  is  more  easily 
accessible.  A  little  independent  tram-line  runs  out  along  the  top  of  the 
old  Portuguese  aqueduct  bringing  water  to  the  Largo  da  Carioca,  cross- 
ing high  above  a  great  gully  filled  with  town  and  metropolitan  bustle, 
winding  away  among  wooded  hills  strewn  with  costly  residences,  to 
Aguas  Ferreas ;  or  one  may  walk  there  by  any  of  several  routes  lined 
by  old  mansions  and  scattered  shops  and,  if  courage  is  equal  to  physi- 
cal exertion  in  the  tropics,  climb  in  a  leisurely  three  hours  to  the  sum- 
mit. But  a  rackrail  train  leaves  Aguas  Ferreas  at  two  each  afternoon, 
and  he  who  can  more  easily  endure  the  cackling  of  tourists  may 
spare  himself  the  ascent  afoot.  A  powerful  electric  engine  thrusts 
the  car  up  the  mountainside  before  it,  by  a  route  so  steep  that  the  city 
below  seems  tilted  sharply  away  from  the  sea.  Much  of  the  way 
is  through  dense,  jungled  forest,  that  militant  tropical  Brazilian  forest 
which  comes  down  to  the  very  gates  of  Rio  and  pursues  the  flabby- 
muscled  urban  population  into  the  very  downtown  streets  of  the  capi- 
tal. Sometimes  the  road  is  cut  through  solid  rock,  at  others  it  glides 
through  long  tunnels  of  vegetation,  to  emerge  all  at  once  in  the  clear 
blue  sky  a  few  steps  from  a  sight  that  is  not  likely  to  be  forgotten 
in  one  brief  life-time. 

From  the  cement  platform  that  has  been  built  out  to  the  edge  of 
the  summit  one  might  look  down  from  dayUght  until  dark  without 
seeing  all  the  details  of  the  city  at  his  feet,  the  tumult  of  jungled 
hills  about  him,  the  bay  with  its  countless  islands  of  every  possible 
shape,  all  spread  out  as  upon  some  huge  relief  map  made  with  in- 
finite care  upon  a  flat,  turquoise-blue  surface  from  which  everything 
protrudes  in  sharp-cut  outline.  Nictheroy,  several  miles  away  across 
the  bay,  seems  close  at  hand,  the  "Sugar  Loaf"  is  just  one  of  many 
insignificant  rocks  bulking  forth  from  the  mirroring  blue  surface  be- 
low, and  the  roar  of  the  beaches  comes  faintly  up  from  all  sides.  .  .  . 
But  the  funiculaire  company  is  apparently  jealous  of  their  view,  or  of 
its  competition  with  other  things  demanding  attention,  for  the  visitors 
are  soon  hurried  down  again — as  far  as  a  hotel  and  cafe  built  in  the 
woods  by  the  thoughtful  corporation,  where  one  may  follow  the  old 
Portuguese  aqueduct  for  miles  through  thick  damp  forest,  if  one  has 
the  energy  and  strategy  necessary  to  escape  the  ubiquitous  purveyors 
of  beer  and  sandwiches. 


AT  LARGE  IN  RIO  DE  JANEIRO  191 

Perhaps  the  finest  experience  of  all — for  there  are  so  many  vantage 
points  about  Rio  that  the  visitor  is  constantly  advancing  his  superla- 
tives— is  the  ascent  of  Tijuca,  highest  of  all  the  summits  within  the 
city  limits,  more  than  a  thousand  feet  above  the  Corcovado  and  3300 
above  the  sea,  its  top  not  infrequently  lost  in  the  clouds.  This  may  be 
reached  from  front  or  rear,  as  a  single  hurried  trip  of  three  or  four 
hours  or  as  the  climax  of  one  of  those  many  all-day  walks  that  may 
be  taken  within  the  bounds  of  Rio  without  once  treading  city  pavements ; 
and  its  charm  is  enhanced  by  its  freedom  from  exploiting  companies 
or  too  easy  accessibility. 

A  prolongation  of  a  principal  boulevard  lifts  one  quickly  into  the 
hills,  or  one  may  strike  out  from  the  end  of  the  Gavea  car-line  upon 
an  automobile  road  that  winds  and  climbs  for  nearly  fifteen  miles 
along  the  cliffs  above  the  sea,  always  within  the  city  limits  yet  amid 
scenes  as  unlike  the  familiar  Rio  as  the  Amazon  jungle.  Here  and 
there  are  tiny  thatched  cabins  all  but  hidden  beneath  the  giant  leaves 
of  the  banana,  pitched  away  up  45-degree  hillsides,  climbing  as  high  as 
their  energy  endures,  the  huts  inhabited  by  shade-loUing  negroes  as 
free  from  care  for  the  morrow  as  the  gently  waving  royal  palm  trees 
far  above  them.  Now  and  then  one  passes  a  rambling  old  house  of 
colonial  days,  perhaps  a  mere  tapera  now,  one  of  those  abandoned 
mansions  fallen  completely  into  ruin  after  the  abolition  of  slavery,  of 
which  there  are  many  in  the  fifty-mile  periphery  of  Rio.  Then  for 
long  spaces  there  is  nothing  but  the  tumultuous  hills  heavily  clothed 
with  dense,  humid  green  forest  piled  up  on  every  side,  the  square, 
laborer's-cap  summit  of  Gavca,  the  Roman  nose  of  its  lofty  neighbor, 
and  other  fantastic  headlands  in  ever  bluer  distance,  with  the  ultra- 
blue  sea  breaking  in  white  lines  of  foam  far  below  and  stretching  to 
the  limitless  horizon.  The  ascent  is  often  abrupt,  sometimes  passing 
a  tropical  lagoon  with  waving  bamboo  along  its  edges,  perpendicular 
walls  here  and  there  rising  to  summits  as  smooth  as  an  upturned  ket- 
tle, sheer  slopes  of  rock,  so  clear  of  vegetation  as  to  be  almost  glassy 
in  appearance,  standing  forth  into  the  sky  as  far  as  tlie  eye  can  follow, 
while  everywhere  the  imperial  palms  wave  their  plumage,  now  high 
above,  now  on  a  level  with  the  eye,  their  cement-like  trunks  stretching 
down  to  be  lost  in  the  jungle  of  some  sharply  V-shaped  valley. 

But  the  more  ordinary  way  to  Tijuca  is  to  take  the  Alta  Boa-^'ista 
car  out  one  of  the  many  fingers  of  Rio,  past  the  formerly  independent 
town  in  which  once  lived  Jose  d'Alencar,  Brazil's  most  prolific  novel- 
ist, to  a  sleepy  suburban  hamlet  well  up  the  mountainside  and  of  the 


192  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

same  name  as  the  peak  above.  Most  travelers  call  that  the  ascent  of 
Tijuca,  or  at  least  are  content  with  a  climb,  by  automobile  preferably, 
a  few  hundred  feet  higher  to  a  charming  little  waterfall  almost  hid- 
den in  tropical  verdure.  But  the  real  excursion  begins  where  the  au- 
tomobile road  and  the  average  tourist  leave  off.  For  two  hours  one 
marches  steadily  upward  through  cool  dense  tropical  forest,  its  trees 
ranging  from  tiny  to  immense  giant  ferns,  bamboos,  and  palms  lining 
all  the  way.  The  trail  grows  steeper  and  more  zigzag,  winding  round 
and  round  the  peak  until  it  breaks  forth  at  last  frankly  in  steps  cut 
in  the  living  rock  and  climbs,  between  two  immense  chains  that  serve 
as  handrails,  straight  up  to  the  summit,  a  bare  spot  like  a  tonsure  or 
an  incipient  baldness  in  the  otherwise  unbroken  vegetation. 

Here  is  a  view  in  some  ways  superior  even  to  that  from  the  Cor- 
covado,  for  one  sees  not  only  all  Rio,  no  portion  of  it  hidden  by  the 
range  beneath,  but  the  whole  seven  hundred  square  miles  of  the  most 
extensive  federal  district  on  earth,  and  mile  upon  mile  away  up  coun- 
try, over  chaotic  masses  of  hills,  through  the  villages  along  the  "Cen- 
tral" and  "Leopoldina"  railways,  to  the  haze-blue  mountains  of  Petrop- 
olis  and  the  "Organ"  range.  Every  island  in  Guanabara  Bay,  from 
huge  Gobernador  in  the  center  of  the  picture  to  the  tiniest  rock  sus- 
taining a  pahn-tree,  all  Nictheroy  and  its  woolly  and  rumpled  district 
beyond,  stand  out  in  plain  sight;  and  on  the  other  side  of  hills  that 
seem  high  when  seen  from  the  city  but  which  from  here  are  mere 
lumps  on  the  surface  of  the  earth,  are  beaches  without  number,  the 
soft,  tropical  Atlantic  spreading  away  to  where  sea  and  sky  melt  im- 
perceptibly together. 


CHAPTER  IX 

BRAZIL,   PAST  AND  PRESENT 

THE  Spaniard  Pinzon  had  already  sighted  what  is  to-day  Brazil 
when,  in  1500,  Pedro  Alves  Cabral,  whom  Portugal  had  sent 
out  to  get  her  share  of  this  new  world,  accidentally  discovered 
land  at  some  point  on  the  present  Brazilian  coast.  He  named  it 
"Vera  Cruz,"  which  not  long  afterward  was  changed  to  "Santa  Cruz." 
But  neither  name  endured,  for  the  only  importance  of  the  country 
during  the  first  century  and  more  after  its  discovery  was  its  exportation 
of  the  fire-colored  wood  of  a  bright  red  tree  which  found  favor  in 
the  old  world  for  decorative  purposes.  This  the  Arabs  called  "bak- 
kam,"  or  "burning  wood,"  a  term  which  became  in  Latin  hresilium,  in 
French  braise,  and  in  Spanish  and  Portuguese  brasil,  and  gradually 
the  "land  of  the  brazil  tree"  came  to  be  known  simply  as  Brazil. 

The  first  white  settler  in  Brazil  of  whom  there  is  any  authentic 
record  was  Diogo  Alvarez  Correa,  a  Portuguese  sailor  whose  ship 
was  wrecked  near  the  present  site  of  Bahia.  His  companions  are  said 
to  have  been  killed  by  the  aborigines,  but  Diogo  won  their  interest 
or  fear  by  means  of  a  long  implement  he  carried  which  belched  fire 
at  a  magic  word  from  its  owner  and  brought  death  upon  anyone  at 
whom  he  pointed  it.  The  Indians  named  this  extraordinary  being 
"Caramuru,"  which  in  their  language  meant  something  like  "producer 
of  lightning"  or  "sudden  death,"  and  welcomed  him  into  their  tribe. 
Diogo  made  the  most  of  his  opportunities  and  had  already  established 
a  considerable  colony  of  half-breed  children  when  he  passed  on  to  new 
explorations  in  another  world.  His  good  work  was  continued  by 
fitting  successors,  since,  to  put  it  in  the  simple  words  of  a  Brazilian 
historian,  "the  first  arrivals  found  no  difficulty  in  procuring  companions 
among  the  Indian  women,  as  the  latter  had  a  peculiar  ambition  to 
possess  children  by  a  race  of  men  whom  they  at  first  deemed  demigods." 
Thus  the  landing-place  of  "Caramuru"  came  in  time  to  be  the  capital  of 
all  Brazil. 

Meanwhile  Joao  Ramalho  had  established  the  village  of  Piratinanga, 

193 


194  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

destined  afterward  to  move  its  site  and  become  Sao  Paulo,  and  de 
Souza  began  the  present  Santos  by  building  the  fort  of  Sao  Vicente, 
while  in  the  north  Olinda  and  Recife  were  showing  the  rivalry  which 
has  culminated  in  the  city  now  called  Pernambuco.  In  1516  Solis 
drifted  into  a  harbor  which  he  named  "River  of  January,"  evidently 
so  incensed  at  its  lack  of  length  or  at  the  heat  of  Brazil's  most  torrid 
month  as  to  refuse  to  give  it  one  of  the  customary  saints'  names. 
His  mistake  was  not  discovered  until  de  Souza  explored  the  bay 
sixteen  years  later  and  found  it  no  river  at  all.  The  French  soon 
began  to  make  settlements  along  the  coast  and  Durand  de  Villegaignon 
of  the  French  navy,  sent  out  by  Coligny,  took  possession  of  the  island 
in  Rio  harbor  which  still  bears  his  name ;  but  the  Portuguese  Mem  da 
Sa  at  length  drove  him  out  and  clinched  the  expulsion  by  founding  a 
fortress  and  thatched  village  on  the  mainland,  which  he  named,  in 
honor  of  the  day's  saint,  "Sao  Sebastiao."  Soon  this  became  a  worthy 
rival  of  Bahia  and  Olinda  and  by  the  end  of  the  sixteenth  century  it 
was  recognized  as  the  capital  of  the  southern  part  of  Portugal's 
possessions  in  the  new  world. 

For  a  time  these  promised  to  remain  less  extensive  than  they  finally 
became.  The  French  founded  a  settlement  called  St.  Louis  on  the 
island  of  Maranhao  off  the  north  coast  of  Brazil  and  gave  evidence 
of  a  desire  to  conquer  more  territory.  In  1624  the  Dutch  formed 
a  "West  India  Company"  and  took  the  capital,  Bahia,  which  was 
recovered  by  the  Spaniards  two  years  later,  both  Portugal  and  Brazil 
being  under  Spanish  dominion  for  sixty  years  at  that  period.  In  1630 
the  Dutch  took  Pernambuco  and  all  Brazil  north  of  the  River  Sao 
Francisco,  and  had  high  hopes  of  annexing  the  entire  country.  By 
1661  luck  had  turned,  however,  and  a  treaty  gave  the  enormous  tract 
now  known  as  Brazil  to  Portugal  for  the  payment  of  eight  million 
florins  to  the  Dutch  and  allowing  them  free  commerce  in  everything 
except  the  principal  export,  the  fiery  brazil  wood.  At  the  end  of  the 
seventeenth  century  this  valuable  product  was  cast  in  the  shade  by 
the  discovery  of  gold  in  the  interior  of  the  country. 

When  the  Conde  da  Cunha  was  sent  out  by  Pombal  as  viceroy  in 
1763  he  was  instructed  to  move  his  capital  from  Bahia  to  Sao  Sebas- 
tiao on  the  "River  of  January,"  the  latter  having  become  more  impor- 
tant because  of  its  proximity  to  the  mines  of  Minas  Geraes  and  to  the 
River  Plata,  where  fighting  with  the  Spaniards  was  frequent.  About 
the  same  time  the  coffee  berry  was  introduced  into  the  hitherto  un- 
important state  of  Sao  Paulo,  noted  until  then  chiefly  for  the  energy 


BRAZIL,  PAST  AND  PRESENT  195 

and  ferocity  of  the  cattle-raising  Paulistas  in  the  steahng  and 
enslaving  of  Indians  from  the  adjacent  Spanish  colonies.  Great 
numbers  of  negro  slaves  had  been  introduced  into  the  country,  par- 
ticularly in  that  paunch-like  portion  of  it  jutting  farthest  out  into  the 
Atlantic  toward  Africa  and  where  the  planting  of  sugarcane  made  a 
large  supply  of  labor  necessary.  Soon  after  the  coming  of  da  Cunha 
the  further  introduction  of  negroes  into  Portuguese  territory  was  for- 
bidden, but  the  decree  was  never  seriously  enforced,  and  the  natural 
increase  of  the  bondsmen,  abetted  by  such  customs  as  freeing  any 
female  slave  who  produced  six  children,  caused  in  time  the  preponder- 
ance of  African  blood. 

When  Rio  de  Janeiro  was  made  the  national  capital  of  Brazil  in 
1763  it  had  some  thirty  thousand  inhabitants.  Nor  did  it  increase 
greatly  during  the  half  century  that  followed.  Its  chief  growth  and 
development  dates  from  the  arrival  of  the  court  in  1808.  Joao  VI 
of  Portugal,  driven  out  of  his  own  land  by  Napoleon,  fled  on  a  British 
ship  "with  all  the  valuables  he  could  lay  hands  on,"  after  the  way  of 
kings,  and  landed  in  Bahia,  soon  afterward  moving  on  to  Rio  and 
setting  up  his  court  under  the  title  of  "King  of  Portugal,  Brazil,  and 
Algarve."  He  opened  the  country  to  foreign  commerce,  imported  the 
royal  palm,  and  carried  out  certain  reforms  in  the  formerly  colonial 
government.  The  way  having  been  cleared  for  him,  he  returned  to 
Portugal  in  1821,  leaving  his  son  behind  as  regent.  On  September  7th 
of  the  following  year  this  son  declared  Brazil  independent  and  pro- 
claimed himself  emperor  under  the  title  of  Pedro  I.  He  was  soon 
succeeded,  however,  by  his  infant  son,  Pedro  II,  whose  reign  of  half  a 
century  was  punctuated  by  a  three  years'  war  against  Rosas,  the  tyrant 
of  the  Argentine,  and  by  the  war  of  1864  in  which  Brazil  joined  the 
Argentine  and  Uruguay  against  the  despot  Lopez  of  Paraguay.  This 
second  conflict  cost  the  country  thousands  of  men  and  £63,000,000  in 
money — which,  by  the  way,  has  not  yet  been  paid — but  it  established 
the  free  navigation  of  the  Paraguay  River  and  put  Rio  de  Janeiro 
into  communication  with  the  great  wilderness  province  of  Matto 
Grosso. 

During  the  reign  of  Pedro  II  there  had  been  much  criticism  of  the 
country's  anachronistic  custom  of  negro  slavery.  This  culminated  in 
1888  in  a  decree  of  emancipation  signed  by  the  Princess  Isabel,  who 
was  acting  as  regent  during  her  father's  illness.  By  this  time  the 
Frenchman  Comte  had  won  many  Brazilian  disciples  for  his  "positiv- 
ist"  philosophy,  and  certain  other  factions  were  showing  a  growing 


196  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

enmity  to  the  monarchy.  These  elements  and  the  leading  planters, 
disgruntled  at  the  loss  of  their  slaves  even  though  they  were  re- 
imbursed for  them  from  the  public  funds,  formed  a  republican  party. 
Finally  the  church,  according  to  a  native  writer,  ''seeing  which  side 
was  going  to  win,  withdrew  her  weight  from  the  crown  and  threw  it 
into  the  other  side  of  the  balance,"  and  on  November  15th,  1889, 
Brazil  was  declared  a  republic. 

Like  the  abolition  of  slavery  the  year  before,  the  change  was  entirely 
without  bloodshed.  The  ostensible  leader  of  the  revolt  was  "Deodoro 
tlie  tarimbeiro"  {tariinba  being  the  cot  of  a  private  soldier),  a  bluli" 
old  military  commander  who  had  the  army  behind  him;  but  the  real 
head  of  the  movement  was  Benjamin  Constant  Botelho  de  Magalhaes, 
who  owed  his  given  name  to  his  father's  admiration  for  a  certain 
French  writer.  Constant  was  a  Positivist,  as  were  several  others  of 
the  leading  republicans,  and  many  hints  of  Comte's  religion,  if  it  may 
be  so  called,  crept  into  the  new  government.  To  a  Positivist  was 
given  the  task  of  designing  a  new  national  flag,  so  that  the  banner  of 
republican  Brazil  is  not  merely  green,  Comte's  chosen  color,  but  bears 
the  words,  from  the  Positivist  motto,  "Ordem  e  Progresso" — to  which 
the  northern  visitor  feels  frequently  impelled  to  add,  "e  Paciencia." 
Unnecessary  violence,  however,  is  contrary  to  the  Positivist  creed,  and 
the  former  opponents  of  the  new  regime  did  not  suffer  the  fate  so 
frequent  in  South  American  revolutions.  Harmless  old  Dom  Pedro 
II  was  put  aboard  a  ship  in  the  harbor  with  his  family,  his  retainers, 
and  his  personal  possessions,  and  "the  bird  of  the  sea  opened  its  white 
wings  and  flew  away  to  the  continent  whence  kings  and  emperors 
eame." 

The  Brazilian  constitution  of  1891  is  an  almost  exact  copy  of  that 
of  the  United  States,  and  under  it  and  the  half  dozen  presidents  who 
have  succeeded  Deodoro,  Brazil  has  prospered  as  well  as  could  per- 
haps be  expected  of  a  tropical  and  temperamental,  young  and  gigantic 
country.  Barely  a  year  after  the  adoption  of  the  constitution  a 
revolution  broke  out  in  the  southernmost  state  and  the  Republic  of 
Brazil  came  near  dying  in  its  infancy.  But  with  the  ending  of  civil 
war  and  the  beginning  of  reconstruction  under  Moraes,  this  setback 
was  regained,  and  the  frequent  threats  of  secession  of  both  the  north 
and  the  south  have  thus  far  come  to  naught.  During  this  same  term 
a  boundary  dispute  between  the  Argentine  and  Brazil  was  arbitrated 
by  the  United  States,  and  in  1898  the  present  frontier  between  French 
Guiana  and  the  state  of  Para  was  established,  leaving  Brazil  as  nearly 


BRAZIL,  PAST  AND  PRESENT  197 

at  peace  with  her  neighbors  as  is  reasonable  in  South  America.  Her 
credit  abroad  was  helped  by  the  burning  of  her  old  paper  money; 
under  an  energetic  Paiilista  president  railroad  construction  was  greatly 
increased  at  the  beginning  of  the  present  century;  Rio  was  largely 
torn  down  and  rebuilt,  and  the  vast  country  was  knitted  more  closely 
together.  To-day  an  "unofficial  compilation"  credits  Brazil  with 
30.553,509  inhabitants,  and  though  the  skeptical  may  be  inclined  to 
question  that  final  9,  there  is  no  doubt  that  it  is  second  only  to  the 
United  States  in  population  in  the  western  hemisphere,  Avith  Mexico  a 
lagging  third  and  the  Argentine  a  badly  outdistanced  fourth.  The 
population  of  the  Federal  District,  which  includes  little  more  than 
the  capital,  is  estimated  at  1,130,080,  "based  on  a  count  of  houses  and 
crediting  each  residence  with  ten  inhabitants";  which  is  perhaps  a 
fair  enough  guess,  for  Brazilian  families  are  seldom  small — and  it 
would  of  course  be  hot  and  uncomfortable  work,  as  well  as  an  in- 
trusion upon  "personal  liberty,"  really  to  take  a  census  in  Brazil  or 
its  capital. 

As  late  as  1850,  according  to  an  old  chronicle,  "the  habits  of  the 
rich  of  Rio  de  Janeiro  were  distressing  and  those  of  the  lower  orders 
abominably  filthy.  Monks  swarmed  in  every  street  and  were  at 
once  sluggards  and  libertines.  The  ladies  of  that  time  usually  lolled 
about  the  house  barefoot  and  bare-legged,  listening  to  the  gossip  and 
scandal  gathered  by  their  favorite  body-women."  Even  at  the  be- 
ginning of  the  present  century  Rio  was  far  from  typing  what  it  is  to- 
day. The  narrow  cobbled  streets  were  worse  than  unclean,  dawdling 
mule-cars  constituted  the  only  urban  transportation,  and  yellow  fever 
victims  were  often  so  numerous  that  there  were  not  coffins  enough  to 
go  round.  Those  obliged  to  come  to  Rio  made  their  wills  and  got 
absolution  for  their  sins  before  undertaking  the  journey.  In  1889, 
when  the  monarchy  was  overthrown,  it  was  seriously  contemplated 
moving  the  capital  away  from  Rio  because  of  the  constant  scourge  of 
"Yellow  Jack."  In  fact,  the  constitution  fixes  the  capital  of  the  republic 
in  its  geographical  center  at  a  selected  spot  in  the  wilderness  of  tlie 
state  of  Goyaz,  and  a  syndicate  offered  to  build  everything  from  a  new 
presidential  palace  to  the  necessary  railroads,  if  given  a  ninety-year 
concession  and  monopoly ;  but  like  so  many  well-reasoned  schemes  this 
one  ran  foul  of  many  unreasonable  but  immovable  facts  and  has  never 
advanced  beyond  the  theory  stage. 

Once  a  hotbed  of  the  most  deadly  tropical  diseases,  Rio  was  sani- 
tated by  a  native  doctor  at  the  cost  of  years  of  incessant  labor  that 


198  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

would  have  disheartened  any  ordinary  man,  until  to-day  it  is  as  free 
from  yellow  fever  and  its  kindred  forms  of  sudden  death  as  New 
York  and  has  as  low  a  death  rate  as  any  large  city  in  the  tropics. 
The  doctor  began  his  struggle  in  1903,  by  act  of  congress,  organizing 
a  sanitary  police  charged  with  clearing  away  all  stagnant  water  within 
the  city  limits,  whether  in  streets,  parks,  gardens,  rainpipes,  gutters, 
sewers,  or — most  astonishing  of  all  in  a  Latin-American  country — 
even  inside  private  houses.  This  policy,  together  with  the  building 
of  new  docks  and  avenues  in  the  congested  lower  city,  and  the  tearing 
down  of  many  infected  old  houses,  virtually  did  away  with  the  breed- 
ing-places of  the  deadly  stegomya  mosquito.  Deaths  from  yellow 
fever  dropped  from  thousands  to  hundreds  in  one  year,  to  tens  in  the 
next,  and  to  none  long  before  the  end  of  the  decade.  To  this  day 
the  sanitary  police  strictly  enforce  their  regulations,  though  the  man 
who  framed  them  has  gone  to  repeat  his  work  in  the  states  bordering 
on  the  Amazon,  and  no  dwelling  can  be  rented  or  reoccupied,  be  it  a 
negro  hovel  or  a  palace,  until  the  owner  has  an  official  certificate  of 
disinfection. 

Among  the  thirty  million  people  imputed  to  the  country,  even  in 
the  fraction  thereof  credited  to  Rio,  there  is  every  possible  combination 
of  African  and  Caucasian  blood,  with  but  slight  trace  of  the  aboriginal 
Indian  and  only  a  sprinkling  of  other  races.  Brazil  is  indeed  a  true 
melting-pot,  far  more  so  than  the  United  States,  for  it  mixes  not 
merely  all  the  European  nationalities  entrusted  to  it,  but  crosses  with 
perfect  nonchalance  the  most  diametrically  opposite  races.  In  theory 
at  least,  in  most  outward  manifestations,  the  Brazilians  are  one 
great  family,  with  virtual  equality  of  opportunity,  quite  irrespective 
of  color  or  previous  condition  of  servitude.  The  haziness  of  the 
color-line  in  Brazil  is  little  short  of  astounding  to  an  American; 
one  cannot  but  wonder  at  the  lack  of  color  prejudice.  Negroes  were 
held  as  slaves  throughout  the  republic  up  to  little  more  than  thirty 
years  ago;  thousands  if  not  millions  of  former  slaves  are  still  alive, 
and  the  tendency  of  humanity  to  look  down  upon  those  forced  to  do 
manual  labor  is  certainly  as  strong  in  Brazil  as  anywhere  on  earth. 
In  England,  France,  or  Germany  there  is  little  color  prejudice  because 
the  stigma  of  forced  manual  labor  was  never  attached  to  any  particular 
color  of  skin,  and  because  the  population  has  not  come  frequently 
enough  in  contact  with  the  African  race  to  feel  the  disrespect  for  it 
which  is  the  basis  of  our  own  color-line.  But  neither  of  these  motives 
are  lacking  in  Brazil.     Is  color  prejudice  so  slight  there  because  the 


BRAZIL,  PAST  AND  PRESENT  199 

Spaniard  and  the  Portuguese,  mixed  with  the  Moors,  often  by  force, 
during  their  conquest  of  the  Iberian  peninsula,  have  lost  the  color 
feeling,  at  least  for  centuries  ?  One  has  only  to  see  a  young  Portuguese 
immigrant  to  Brazil  openly  fondling  a  black  girl  amid  the  ribald 
laughter  of  his  companions  quite  as  our  own  young  rowdies  dally 
with  girls  of  their  own  class  at  summer  picnics  or  ward-healers'  dances 
to  understand  the  widespread  mixture  of  races  in  South  America. 
Though  the  actual  importation  of  African  slaves  into  Brazil  ceased 
some  eighty  years  ago,  and  immigration  since  then  has  been  almost 
entirely  from  Europe,  it  has  been  chiefly  from  the  more  ignorant  and 
backward  countries  of  southern  Europe,  where  the  color-line  is  at 
most  embryonic.  The  Portuguese  man  and  the  negro  woman  get 
along  very  well  domestically  in  Brazil ;  even  the  Portuguese  woman 
joins  forces  with  a  black  man  without  feeling  that  she  has  in  any  way 
lowered  herself  or  her  race.  The  number  of  young  half-breeds 
sprawling  about  the  poorer  houses  of  the  immigrant  sections  or  stand- 
ing in  the  doorways  of  Portuguese  shops  in  the  serene  nudity  of  bronze 
figures  shows  how  general  is  this  point  of  view. 

There  are  other  causes  for  this  lack  of  racial  friction  in  Brazil. 
Slavery  seems  to  have  been  less  harsh  and  cruel  than  in  the  United 
States.  With  but  slight  color  prejudice  or  feeling  even  among  the 
Portuguese  who  formed  the  great  majority  of  the  owning  class,  the 
relation  of  the  Brazilian  slave  to  his  master  was  more  in  the  nature 
of  a  hired  servant.  The  slaves  belonged  to  the  same  church,  they 
observed  the  same  feast  days,  there  were  cases  where  they  even  married 
into  the  master's  family.  There  w-as  a  species  of  local  autonomy  in 
the  matter  of  slavery,  slaves  being  held  in  any  province  where  it  was 
locally  legal  and  profitable;  nor  must  we  lose  sight  of  the  fact  that 
there  was  no  statehood  problem  to  agitate  and  increase  the  differences 
of  opinion  on  the  subject,  no  fear  that  each  new  territory  admitted  to 
the  union  would  disturb  the  political  balance  of  power  in  the  federal 
capital.  Thus  when  the  question  of  abolition  arose  it  did  not  divide  the 
country  into  two  sharply  defined  camps,  with  the  resultant  generations 
of  enmity  that  it  bred  in  our  own  land. 

Not  long  after  our  Civil  War  the  agitation  for  the  freeing  of  the 
slaves  began  in  Brazil.  There,  strangely  enough,  it  came  from  the 
north,  the  more  tropical  section  of  the  country,  partly  no  doubt  because 
the  Amazonian  regions,  settled  long  after  the  sugar-growing  lands  of 
Pernambuco  and  Bahia  where  intensive  labor  was  needed,  found  white 
immigration  and  their  part-Indian  population  sufficient  for  their  im- 


200  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

mediate  needs.  At  length  a  bill  was  passed  by  congress  and  signed 
by  the  Princess  Isabel  making  free  any  child  thenceforth  born  of  a 
slave,  and  paving  the  way  to  the  law  of  1888  abolishing  slavery  en- 
tirely. The  latter  was  "premature"  according  to  some  Brazilians  even 
of  to-day,  who  point  to  the  many  ruined  plantations  within  fifty  miles 
of  Rio  as  proof  of  their  contention ;  it  was  undoubtedly  one  of  the 
motives  of  the  revolution  which  drove  monarchy  from  the  western 
hemisphere  in  the  following  year.  But  the  fact  that  what  cost  us 
four  years  of  savage  warfare  was  accomplished  in  Brazil  almost  by 
common  consent,  without  the  shedding  of  a  drop  of  blood,  left  the 
"color  question"  far  less  acute  than  in  the  United  States.  There  is  a 
saying  in  Brazil  that  slavery  was  buried  under  flowers,  and  as  a  result 
there  is  no  hatred  either  between  sections  of  the  country  or  between 
the  races  that  inhabit  it;  with  no  deep  national  or  sectional  wounds  to 
heal  a  fraternal  relationship  quickly  grew  up,  so  that  to-day  blacks 
and  whites  celebrate  Emancipation  Day  together  in  much  the  same 
spirit  which  we  do  our  Fourth  of  July. 

In  popular  intercourse  the  color  of  a  man's  skin  is  of  little  more 
importance  in  Brazil  than  the  color  of  his  hair.  Indeed,  it  is  common- 
place to  hear  people  referring  to  their  varying  tints  in  much  the  same 
amused  and  friendly  spirit  in  which  our  debutantes  might  speak  of  a 
sunburn,  and  there  is  no  offense  whatever  in  nicknames  of  color.  The 
Brazilian,  in  fact,  does  not  recognize  a  negro  when  he  sees  one.  Ask 
him  how  many  of  the  thirty  millions  are  of  that  race  and  he  will 
probably  reply,  "Oh,  eight  hundred  thousand  to  a  million."  From  his 
point  of  view  that  is  true.  There  is  no  all-inclusive  word  "negro"  or 
"nigger"  in  the  Brazilian  language.  To  use  the  term  negro  or  preto 
IS  merely  to  say  "black,"  and  it  may  be  that  there  are  not  more  than 
a  million  full  blacks  in  Brazil.  But  there  are  many  millions  with 
more  or  less  African  blood  in  their  veins,  for  whom  the  native  language 
has  a  score  of  designations  all  nicely  graded  according  to  the  tint  of 
the  complexion.  There  is  a  difference  between  the  full  negro  and 
the  mulatto  in  Brazil  which  does  not  exist  in  the  United  States ;  like  the 
Eurasian  of  India  the  latter  considers  himself  more  closely  allied 
to  the  whites,  and  acts  accordingly.  Thus  it  is  impossible  to  put  the 
question  to  a  Brazilian  as  it  can  be  put  to  an  American.  After  travel- 
ing in  every  state  of  Brazil,  however,  I  have  no  hesitancy  in  asserting 
that  two-thirds  of  the  population  would  have  to  ride  in  "Jim  Crow" 
cars  in  our  southern  states. 

The  question  of  the  mixture  of  races  is  unusually  interesting  in 


BRAZIL,  PAST  AND  PRESENT  20t 

Brazil,  especially  as  many  Brazilians  seriously  believe  that  their  free- 
dom of  interbreeding  is  producing  a  new  type  of  humanity,  under 
the  combmed  mfluences  of  climate,  immigration,  and  the  fusion  of 
many  stocks  by  no  means  all  Caucasian,  that  can  endure  the  heat  of 
the  tropics  and  at  the  same  time  retain  some  of  the  energy  and  initiative 
of  the  temperate  zones.  All  sentiment  or  repugnance  aside,  it  is 
possible  that  the  catholic  cross-breeding  sanctioned  by  the  Iberian  creed 
may  prove  economically  more  profitable  to  tropical  America  than  the 
Anglo-Saxon's  instinctive  aversion  to  fusion  with  the  colored  races. 
Yet  humanly,  it  seems  to  the  outsider,  the  results  are  not  so  promising; 
it  looks  less  as  if  Brazil  were  solving  the  color  question  than  as  if  color 
were  dissolving  Brazil.  The  citizen  produced  by  the  intermixture  of 
Portuguese  with  negroes  is  not  visibly  an  improvement  on  the  parent 
stocks.  The  mulattoes  or  quadroons  are  often  brighter,  quicker  of 
intelligence,  than  either  the  ox-like  Portuguese  or  the  full-blooded 
Africans ;  but  it  is  widely  agreed,  even  in  Brazil,  that  they  have  neither 
the  moral  nor  physical  stamina,  that  they  take  on  most  of  the  faults, 
and  retain  few  of  the  virtues  of  their  ancestors. 

In  Rio  de  Janeiro  evidence  of  this  general  interbreeding  confronts 
the  visitor  at  every  step,  in  all  classes  of  society,  far  more  so  than  in 
Sao  Paulo  and  the  other  southern  states,  where  the  flowing  tide  of 
Italian  and  other  European  immigration  has  given  Caucasian  blood  the 
ascendency.  Even  at  his  best  the  average  Brazilian  is  not  prepossessing 
in  appearance;  in  Rio's  most  elite  gatherings  a  fine  face  is  a  rarety; 
in  her  street  crowds  even  a  passable  one  is  sufficient  motive  for  an 
exclamation.  Every  shade  of  color,  of  negroid  type  and  features  are 
indiscriminately  mixed  together,  while  poor  and  insignificant  physique, 
bad  teeth,  and  kindred  signs  of  degeneracy  are  almost  universal. 
There  is  something  disagreeable  about  mingling  with  the  throng  in 
Brazil ;  surrounded  on  all  sides  by  micegenation,  the  visitor  develops 
a  subconscious  fear  that  his  own  blood  will  inadvertently  get  a  negro 
strain  in  it.  But  by  the  time  he  has  been  a  month  or  two  in  the 
country,  especially  if  this  has  been  preceded  by  a  year  or  more  in  the 
rest  of  South  America,  he  scarcely  notices  the  undersizedness,  the  lack 
of  robustness,  the  patent  weakness  of  character  in  a  Brazilian  crowd. 
He  needs  an  occasional  shock  of  contrast  to  bring  his  sense  of  com- 
parison back  to  normal.  The  insignificance  of  the  prevailing  type  is 
quickly  thrown  into  clear  relief  when  a  pair  of  burly  clear-skinned 
Scandinavian  seamen  from  one  of  the  ships  down  at  the  docks  come 


202  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

shouldering  their  way  through  a  native  crowd  averaging  a  head  shorter 
than  they. 

Yet  the  equaUty  of  mankind  irrespective  of  color  is  probably  in  a 
way  as  good  for  the  white  man  in  Brazil  as  it  is  advantageous  to  the 
negro.  It  saves  him  from  presuming  on  his  own  importance  simply 
because  he  happens  to  be  white,  as  not  infrequently  occurs  in  our  own 
land.  Perhaps  it  is  because  the  Brazilian  negro  does  not  himself 
consciously  draw  the  color-line,  because  he  is  instinctively  courteous, 
gives  one  half  the  sidewalk  like  a  cavalheiro,  yet  does  not  obsequiously 
shrink  before  a  white  man,  that  he  arouses  less  dislike — or  whatever 
it  is — than  the  American  negro ;  or  it  may  simply  be  that  one's  feelings 
change  with  one's  environment. 

Yet  at  bottom  there  is  a  real  color-line  in  Brazil,  though  the  casual 
visitor  may  never  discover  it.  Evidence  of  it  must  be  pieced  together 
out  of  hints  that  turn  up  from  time  to  time.  Azevedo's  novel  "O 
Mulato,"  the  reader  finds,  hinges  on  the  secret  color  prejudices  of  north 
Brazil.  One  runs  across  a  paragraph  tucked  away  in  a  back  corner 
of  a  newspaper: 

DISAGREEABLE  INCIDENT 

It  is  reported  that  the  intelligent  and 
cultured  son  of  a  state  senator  of  Bahia 
was  refused  admission  to  our  national 
military  academy  for  the  mere  motive 
that  he  is  black. 

I  have  more  than  once  had  a  Brazilian  of  that  pale  darkness  of  com- 
plexion common  to  those  who  have  lived  for  generations  in  the  tropics 
draw  back  a  sleeve  to  convince  me  that  the  color  of  his  hands  and 
face  is  climatic  rather  than  racial,  at  the  same  time  asserting  almost 
in  a  whisper  that  the  "aristocratic  old  families"  of  Brazil  are  just  as 
proud  of  their  Caucasian  blood,  and  fully  as  determined  that  it  shall 
not  be  sullied  with  African,  as  are  "os  Americanos  do  Norte."  But 
positive  proof  that  there  is  no  illegitimate  strain  in  their  veins  is  so 
rare,  and  pure-blooded  families  are  so  greatly  in  the  majority,  that 
they  usually  keep  their  color  prejudices  to  themselves.  It  does  not  pay 
to  express  such  sentiments  openly  in  a  land  largely  in  the  hands  of 
negroes,  or  at  least  of  those  of  negro  blood,  where  the  government 
averages  the  mulatto  tint,  where  the  army  which  accomplished  the 
change  from  monarchy  to  republic  is  still  powerful  and  overwhelm- 
ingly African  in  its  enlisted  personnel. 
The  constitution  and  the  law-making  and  executive  bodies  of  Brazil 


BRAZIL,  PAST  AND  PRESENT  203 

are  similar  to  those  of  the  United  States,  more  so,  in  fact,  than  in  any 
other  country  of  South  America.  Here,  too,  there  are  states  rather 
than  provinces;  those  states  are  largely  autonomous,  even  less  closely 
federated  than  our  own  and  vastly  less  so  than  the  provinces  of 
Spanish-America,  which  are  governed  mainly  from  the  national  capitals. 
In  so  far  as  any  real  one  exists,  the  division  between  the  two  main 
political  parties  in  Brazil  is  the  line  separating  those  who  wish  a  more 
centralized  government  from  those  who  wish  the  present  semi-freedom 
of  the  states  to  continue,  if  not  to  be  increased.  It  is  the  contention 
of  the  latter  that  state  autonomy  permits  a  fuller  development  of 
independent  activity,  which  in  the  end  is  of  advantage  to  the  entire 
federation.  The  other  side  points  to  the  frequent  threats  of  secession 
■ — now  of  Rio  Grande  do  Sul  because  it  feels  it  is  neglected  and  ex- 
ploited by  the  central  government,  now  of  industrial  Sao  Paulo,  pros- 
perous Pernambuco,  or  self-sufficient  Amazonia  as  a  protest  against 
supporting  and  being  hampered  by  the  throng  of  official  loafers  in  the 
federal  capital,  now  of  the  north  from  the  south  for  mere  incom- 
patability  of  temperament — as  proof  that  the  existing  loose  bonds  are 
perilous  to  the  future  of  the  republic.  As  in  all  Latin-America,  how- 
ever, political  parties  are  much  more  a  matter  of  personalities,  of 
rallying  about  some  particular  leader  rather  than  about  a  given  set  of 
principles,  and  except  in  minor  details  there  is  no  visible  difference 
between  the  two  principal  divisions.  To  put  it  more  concisely,  in  the 
words  of  a  frank  politician:  "Party  lines?  Well,  you  see  Brazil  is 
like  a  great  banquet  table,  heaped  with  all  manner  of  food  and  deli- 
cacies. There  is  not  room  for  everyone  at  it,  so  those  of  us  who 
are  seated  are  on  one  side,  and  those  who  are  constantly  trying  to 
crowd  into  our  places  form  the  other  party." 

An  American  long  resident  in  Brazil  asserted  that  the  future  of  the 
country  is  in  the  hands  of  the  fazendeiros  of  the  interior,  industrious, 
tenacious,  totally  different  from  the  city  dwellers,  a  law  unto  them- 
selves, original  because  they  have  no  precedents.  However  true  this 
may  be,  one  soon  realizes  that  Rio  is  mainly  a  port  and  a  point  of  dis- 
tribution, living  on  the  "rake-off"  from  the  business  passing  through 
its  hands,  and  that  such  productive  activity  as  exists  is  chiefly  due 
to  foreign  residents.  The  "upper  class"  Brazilian  at  least  has  inherited 
his  Portuguese  forefather's  distaste  for  work  and  his  preference  for 
a  government  sinecure ;  thanks  perhaps  to  the  climate,  he  is  even  more 
strongly  of  that  inclination  than  his  ancestors.  Almost  every  native 
of  social  pretensions  one  meets  in  Rio  is  on  the  government  pay-roll, 


204  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

and  the  city  swarms  with  clerks  and  bureaucrats.  The  centuries  dur- 
ing which  the  mineral  wealth  of  Brazil  poured  into  the  public  coffers 
of  Portugal,  and  from  them  into  the  pockets  of  politicians  and  court 
favorites,  bred  the  notion,  still  widely  prevalent  in  all  Latin-America^ 
that  "the  government"  is  a  great  reservoir  of  supply  for  those  wha 
know  how  to  tap  it,  rather  than  a  servant  of  the  general  population. 
To  the  latter,  on  the  contrary,  it  is  something  in  the  nature  of  a  power- 
ful foreign  enemy,  with  which  the  average  citizen  has  nothing  to  do  if 
he  can  possibly  avoid  it,  except  to  trick  or  rob  it  when  he  gets  a  chance, 
yet  which  he  expects  to  do  miracles  unaided,  as  if  it  were  some  kind  of 
god — mixed  with  devil. 

It  has  often  been  said  that  the  Argentine,  Uruguay,  and  to  a  certain 
extent  Chile  are  more  progressive  than  the  rest  of  South  America, 
because  they  are  ruled  by  whites.  In  her  highest  offices  Brazil,  too,, 
usually  has  men  of  Caucasian  race ;  but  the  great  mass  of  citizens  being 
more  or  less  African— though  two  years'  residence  suffices  for  voting 
rights — the  country  is  really  under  a  mulatto  government.  Even  im- 
migration is  at  present  unable  to  better  this  matter,  because  white 
newcomers  are  numerically  and  linguistically  so  weak  that  they  have 
little  say  in  the  government  and  their  efforts  merely  make  the  country 
richer  and  give  the  worthless  native  more  chance  to  engage  in  politics. 
Swarms  of  part-negro  parasites,  what  might  be  called  the  sterile  class, 
are  incessantly  on  the  trail  of  the  producer,  constantly  preying  on 
productive  industry,  and  supernaturally  clever  in  devising  schemes  to 
appropriate  the  lion's  share  of  their  earnings.  It  seems  to  be  a  fixed 
policy  of  Brazilian  government  to  lie  low  until  a  head  raises  itself 
industriously  above  the  horizon— then  "swat"  it!  Its  motto  evidently 
is,  "The  moment  you  find  a  golden  egg,  hunt  up  the  goose  and  choke  it 
to  death."  Brazilian  taxes  make  those  of  other  lands  seem  mere  finan- 
cial pin-pricks.  To  begin  with,  there  is  a  "protective"  tariff  so  intricate 
that  it  requires  an  expert  despachante  to  deal  with  it,  and  so  high  that 
those  are  rare  imports  that  do  not  at  least  double  their  prices  at  the 
customhouse.  Then  there  is  the  omnipresent  "consumption  impost." 
Scarcely  a  thing  can  be  offered  for  sale  until  it  has  a  federal  revenue 
stamp  affixed  to  it.  If  you  buy  a  hat  you  find  a  document  pasted 
inside  showing  that  the  government  has  already  levied  2$ooo  upon  the 
sale ;  a  4$ooo  umbrella  has  a  $500  stamp  wound  round  the  top  of  the 
rod ;  every  pair  of  shoes  has  a  stamp  stuck  on  the  inside  of  one  of  the 
heels — for  some  reason  they  have  not  yet  thought  of  selling  each  shoe 
separately.     Almost  nothing  is  without  its  revenue  stamp;  and,  be  it 


BRAZIL,  PAST  AND  PRESENT  205 

noted,  the  stamp  must  be  affixed  before  the  goods  are  offered  for  sale, 
so  that  a  merchant  may  have  hundreds  of  dollars  tied  up  in  revenue 
stamps  on  his  shelves  for  years,  even  if  he  does  not  lose  their  value 
entirely  by  the  articles  proving  unsalable.  There  is  a  "consumption" 
tax  on  every  box  of  matches,  over  the  cork  of  every  bottled  beverage, 
be  it  imported  wine  or  local  mineral  or  soda-water.  Tooth-paste  is 
considered  a  luxury,  as  by  most  legislators,  and  pays  a  high  impost 
accordingly ;  there  is  a  stamp  on  every  receipt  or  bank  check,  on  every 
lottery,  railway,  steamer,  or  theater  ticket,  on  every  birth,  marriage, 
or  burial  certificate;  there  are  taxes  until  your  head  aches  and  your 
pocketbook  writhes  with  agony,  impostos  until  only  the  foolish  would 
think  of  trying  to  save  money,  since  it  is  sure  to  be  taken  away  as 
soon  as  the  government  hears  of  it.  A  cynical  editor  complained  that 
there  is  no  tax  on  revolutions  and  that  "French  women"  are  allowed  to 
go  unstamped. 

But  this  is  only  the  beginning — and  these  things,  by  the  way,  are 
no  aftermath  of  the  World  War,  but  were  in  force  long  before  the 
war-impoverished  world  at  large  had  thought  of  them.  State  and 
municipal  taxes  are  as  ubiquitous,  and  iniquitous,  as  those  of  the  fed- 
eral government.  Among  the  few  ways  in  which  the  Brazilians  who 
overthrew  the  monarchy  did  not  copy  the  American  constitution  was 
in  not  decreeing  free  trade  between  the  states,  with  the  result  that 
politicians  who  cannot  fatten  on  federal  imposts  may  feed  on  state 
import  and  export  duties.  Many  a  state  taxes  ever3rthing  taken  in  or 
out  of  it ;  at  least  one  even  taxes  the  citizens  who  go  outside  the  state 
to  work.  The  beans  of  Rio  Grande  do  Sul,  where  they  are  sometimes 
a  drug  on  the  market,  cannot  be  sent  to  hungry  states  because  the 
growers  cannot  pay  the  high  export  and  import  taxes  between  them 
and  their  market.  Many  a  Brazilian  city  imports  its  potatoes  from 
Portugal,  at  luxury  prices,  while  pigs  are  feeding  on  those  grown  just 
beyond  a  nearby  state  boundary.  If  you  buy  a  bottle  of  beer  or 
mineral  water,  you  will  probably  find  a  federal,  a  state,  and  a  municipal 
tax-stamp  on  it.  Every  merchant  down  to  the  last  street-hawker, 
every  newsboy  or  lottery-vendor,  wears  or  otherwise  displays  a  license 
to  do  business. 

The  politicians  are  constantly  on  the  lookout  for  some  new  form  of 
taxation,  but  as  they  have  the  same  scarcit>'  of  original  ideas  in  this 
matter  as  in  others,  the  ancestry  of  most  of  their  schemes  can  be 
traced  back  to  Europe  or  North  America.  Thus  they  copied  the  "pro- 
tective" tariff  of  the  United  States,  though  there  are  few  native  in- 


2o6  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

dustries  to  "protect,"  not  only  because  it  was  an  easy  way  to  raise 
revenue  but  because  it  gave  many  openings  for  political  henchmen. 
They  were  just  beginning  to  hear  of  the  income  tax  at  the  time  of  my 
visit  and  to  plan  legislation  accordingly.     The  more  sources  of  easy 
money  of  this  kind  the  government  discovers,  the  worse  it  seems  to 
be  for  the  country,  not  only  in  cramping  existing  industry  but  by 
drawing  more  of  the  population  away  from  production  into  the  sterile 
ranks  of  the  seekers  after  government  sinecures.     Thanks  partly  to 
Iberian  custom,  partly  to  the  power  of  the  second  greatest  class  of 
non-producers— absentee  owners  of  big  estates— there  is  little  or  no 
land  or  real  estate  tax,  except  in  the  cities,  and  in  consequence  many 
squatters  and  few  clear  titles.     But  this  is  about  the  only  form  of 
financial  oppression  the  swarthy  rulers  have  overlooked,  and  now  and 
then   they   show   outcroppings   of    originaUty   that   resemble    genius. 
When  the  outbreak  of  war  in  Europe  sharpened  their  wits  they  had 
the  happy  thought,  among  others  of  like  nature,  of  charging  duty  on 
foreign  newspapers  arriving  by  mail  and  of  recharging  full  foreign 
postage  on  prepaid  letters  from  abroad  that  were  forwarded  from  one 
town  to  another  within  the  republic,  or  even  within  the  same  state. 
Postal  Union  rules  to  the  contrary  notwithstanding.     Brazil  once  ran 
a  post  office  savings  bank,  but  after  taking  in  millions  from  the  poorer 
class  of  the  community  this  suspended  payment,  and  to-day  a  govern- 
ment bank-book  with  5,ooo$ooo  credited  in  it  cannot  be  sold  for  two- 
fifths  that  amount.       During  the  war  one  could  buy  a  postal  order  in 
any  city  of  Brazil,  but  if  the  addressee  attempted  to  cash  it  he  was 
informed  that  there  was  no  money  on  hand  for  such  purposes.     More 
ihan  that,  if  your  correspondent  returned  the  unpayable  order  to  you, 
your  own  post  office  would  laugh  at  the  idea  of  giving  you  back  the 
money.     Furthermore,  if  you  received  a  postal  order  payable,  say,  in 
Sao  Paulo,  and  presented  it  at  the  same  time  that  you  bought  another 
order  on  the  issuing  office,  the  tar-brushed  clerk  would  calmly  rake  in 
your  money  with  one  hand  and  thrust  your  order  back  with  the  other 
with  the  information  that  the  post  office  had  no  funds  on  hand  to  pay  it. 
If  all  or  even  a  large  proportion  of  the  income  from  this  hydra- 
headed  revenue  system  reached  the  public  coffers  and  passed  out  from 
them  in  proper  channels  of  public  improvement,  there  would  be  less 
cause  for  complaint  on  the  part  of  the  tax-payers.     But  not  only  is 
a  great  amount  of  it  diverted  to  the  pockets  of  politicians  and  their 
sycophants,  even  before  it  becomes  a  part  of  the  public  funds,  by 
such  simple  expedients  as  bribery  of  those  whose  duty  it  is  to  collect 


BRAZIL,  PAST  AND  PRESENT  207 

them,  but  the  outlets  from  the  pubHc  coffers  are  many  and  devious, 
not  a  few  ending  in  unexplored  swamps  and  morasses.  Nor  does  this 
well-known  and  widely  commented-upon  state  of  affairs  arouse  to 
action  the  despoiled  majority.  Bursts  of  popular  indignation  take 
other  forms  in  Brazil.  Everyone  seems  to  endure  robbery  unpro- 
testingly  and  await  his  chance  to  recoup  in  similar  manner.  Were  all 
Brazilians  honest,  it  would  work  out  to  about  the  same  division  of 
property  in  the  end — and  save  them  much  mental  exertion.  We  have 
no  lack  of  political  corruption  in  the  United  States,  but  here  at  least 
it  is  sometimes  unearthed  and  punished.  In  Brazil  the  political  grafter 
is  immune,  both  because  Portuguese  training  has  made  his  machina- 
tions seem  a  matter  of  course  and  because  the  "outs"  do  not  propose 
to  establish  a  troublesome  precedent  by  auditing  the  actions  of  those 
temporarily  in  power. 

The  Brazilians  are  inclined  to  be  spendthrifts  individually  and 
nationally.  Both  the  public  and  the  private  attitude  is  suggestive  of 
the  prodigal  son  of  an  indulgent  father  of  unlimited  wealth.  Fortunes 
made  quickly  and  easily  in  slave  times  have  in  most  instances  long  since 
been  squandered ;  the  families  who  more  recently  grew  rich  from 
cattle,  sugar,  or  coffee  have  in  many  cases  already  gambled  and  rioted 
their  wealth  away.  Neither  the  individual  nor  the  nation  is  content 
to  live  wiUiin  its  income.  The  politicians  periodically  coax  a  loan  from 
foreign  capitalists,  spend  it  in  riotous  living,  and  when  the  interest 
comes  due  seek  to  place  a  "refunding  loan,"  to  borrow  money  to  pay 
the  interest  on  the  money  they  have  borrowed.  Financially  Brazil 
had  reached  a  critical  stage  before  the  beginning  of  the  World  War, 
not  only  the  federal  government  owing  a  colossal  foreign  debt,  but 
nearly  every  state  and  municipality  staggering  into  bankruptcy.  The 
government  had  issued  enormous  quantities  of  paper  money  bearing 
the  statement  "The  National  Treasury  promises  to  pay  the  bearer  io$" 
— or  some  other  sum;  yet  take  a  ragged,  illegible  bill  to  the  treasury 
and  you  would  probably  be  told,  "Well,  you  have  the  10$  there, 
haven't  you?"  and  thus  the  paper  continued  in  circulation  until  it 
wore  out  and  disappeared  and  the  government  issued  more  at  the 
total  cost  of  the  cheap  material  and  the  printing.  Soon  after  the  out- 
break of  the  war  all  foreign  banks  in  Brazil  refused  to  lend  the 
government  any  more  money,  whereupon  the  politicians  authorized 
the  issue  of  1 5o,ooo,ooo$ooo  in  gold;  that  is,  as  it  was  explained  later 
on  in  tiny  type  on  them,  notes  payable  in  gold,  though  everyone  in 
Brazil    knew    that    even    those    already    outstanding    could    not    be 


2o8  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

redeemed.  A  saving  clause  at  the  end  of  the  decree  read,  "If  when 
these  notes  come  due  the  government  has  not  the  gold  on  hand  to  pay 
them,  then  it  may  redeem  them  in  paper."  Such  was  the  mulatto 
government's  idea  of  "meeting  the  present  world's  crisis." 

Of  a  piece  with  their  other  schemes  are  the  federal  and  at  least  two 
state  lotteries  supported  by  the  population  mainly  for  the  advantage 
of  the  politicians.  There  are  persons  who  contend  that  a  lottery 
supplies  a  harmless  outlet  for  a  natural  craving  for  excitement,  at  a 
moderate  cost  to  the  individual  and  with  a  benefit  to  the  state  that 
operates  it.  With  the  Latin-American  the  intoxication  of  the  lottery 
is  said  to  take  the  place  of  alcoholic  intoxication  in  the  Anglo-Saxon. 
All  this  may  be  more  or  less  true,  but  at  least  the  state  loses  much 
activity  of  its  day-dreaming  citizens,  while  the  bureaucracy  and  the 
politicians  are  fattening  on  the  profits.  Lottery  drawings  succeed  one 
another  with  feverish  frequency  in  Brazil — the  powers  that  be  see 
to  that,  whatever  other  duties  they  may  be  forced  to  neglect.  The 
streets  of  every  large  city  swarm  with  ragged  urchins  and  brazen- 
voiced  touts  who  press  tickets  upon  the  passer-by  at  every  turn,  each 
guaranteeing  that  his  is  the  winning  number.  Every  block  in  the 
business  section  has  its  camhistas  lying  in  wait  in  their  ticket-decorated 
shops;  besides  the  veritable  pest  of  street  vendors  pursuing  their 
victims  into  the  most  secret  corners,  there  are  cambios  all  over  the 
country  and  perambulating  ticket-hawkers  canvassing  even  the  rural 
districts.  Everyone  "plays  the  lottery."  The  young  lady  on  her  way 
home  from  church  stops  to  buy  a  ticket,  or  at  least  a  "piece"  of  ticket, 
as  innocently  as  she  would  a  ribbon ;  school  children  enter  their  class- 
rooms loudly  discussing  the  merits  of  the  various  numbers  they  have 
chosen ;  the  number  of  persons  losing  sleep,  or  going  to  sleep  on  the 
job,  figuring  up  what  they  will  do  with  the  hundred  thousand  reis  they 
are  always  sure  of  winning  is  beyond  computation.  The  lottery 
cannot  but  add  to  the  natural  tendency  of  the  Latin-American  to  put 
it  off  until  to-morrow,  for  if  it  is  not  done  to-day  perhaps  he  will 
win  the  grand  prize  this  evening  and  never  have  to  do  it  at  all. 
Brazil  had  long  been  struggling  to  get  a  loan  from  Europe,  but  when 
the  war  gave  capitalists  a  chance  to  lend  their  money  nearer  home 
at  higher  rates  and  with  better  security  the  Brazilians  were  naturally 
left  out  in  the  cold.  Editors  complained  that  when  France  offered 
government  bonds  her  citizens  rushed  forward  and  subscribed  the 
amount  several  times  over  in  one  day,  while  Brazil  could  not  get  any 
response  whatever  from  her  own  people.     Yet  not  a  scrivener  among 


BRAZIL,  PAST  AND  PRESENT  209 

them  noted  that  if  the  Brazilian  government  could  get  at  a  fair  rate 
of  interest  on  a  legitimate  investment  a  fraction  of  the  enormous  sums 
her  people  pay  into  the  state  and  national  lotteries  every  week  there 
would  have  been  no  need  to  go  abroad  seeking  a  "refunding  loan." 

Brazil  won  her  political  independence  a  century  ago,  but  economically 
she  is  more  dependent  on  the  outside  world  to-day  than  in  1822. 
In  colonial  times  wheat  was  grown  in  all  the  half  dozen  southernmost 
states;  now  the  big  flour-mills  of  Rio  are  fed  entirely  from  the 
Argentine.  Brazil  is  so  dependent  on  her  imports,  so  self-insufficient, 
importing  even  the  food  products  she  could  so  easily  grow  or  the  most 
insignificant  manufactured  articles  which  she  could  readily  produce, 
even  though  she  almost  wholly  lacks  coal  deposits,  that  any  disturbance 
of  shipping  throws  her  into  a  panic.  Natives  refuse  to  develop  the 
resources  of  the  country,  out  of  indolence,  lack  of  confidence  or 
initiative,  or  because  they  prefer  to  squander  their  capital  in  fast 
living;  yet  when  the  "gringo"  comes  in  and  starts  an  industry  the  native 
either  steps  up  with  a  title  to  the  property  showing  that  he  inherited  it 
direct  from  Adam,  or,  if  he  cannot  take  it  away  from  the  newcomer 
in  that  way,  he  taxes  all  the  profits  into  his  own  pockets.  The  war 
forced  Brazil  to  develop  some  of  her  own  resources,  to  produce  for 
herself  many  of  the  things  she  had  always  bought  from  abroad  on 
credit;  it  compelled  a  considerable  agricultural  development  and 
reduced  the  number  of  shopkeepers.  Yet  the  country  has  already 
slumped  back  again  into  the  old  rut,  and  to-day,  as  before  the  war, 
her  imports  are  nearly  three  times  her  exports  and  she  is  keeping 
her  nose  above  water  only  by  such  stop-gaps  as  ''refunding  loans." 

By  no  means  all  Brazilians  are  pleased  with  the  change  from  a 
monarchy  to  a  republic.  There  is  still  a  large  and  influential  mon- 
archical party,  composed  partly  of  the  wealthier  class  and  those  who 
have  always  remained  monarchists,  partly  of  citizens  who  have  become 
disgusted  with  the  squabbling  and  graft  of  mulatto  democracy,  or 
who,  on  economic  and  political  grounds,  have  grown  dissatisfied  with 
the  republican  regime  and  are  convinced  that  the  salvation  of  Brazil 
lies  in  the  restoration  of  the  old  form  of  government.  It  is  rare  and 
usually  a  mistake,  however,  to  back  water  in  life,  and  the  imitative 
faculty  of  the  Brazilian  makes  it  all  the  more  unlikely  that  the  former 
regime  will  return,  unless  a  failure  of  democracy  the  world  over  makes 
it  a  la  mode  to  bring  about  such  a  change. 

There  was,  of  course,  corruption  under  the  monarchy,  but  one  need 
not  inquire  long  in  Rio  to  find  a  man  ready  to  admit  that  the  pall  of 


2IO  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

mulatto  politicians  and  bureaucrats  which  hangs  over  republican  Brazil 
IS  more  burdensome  than  ever  were  the  grasping  Portuguese  courtiers 
of  a  century  ago.  At  least  the  latter  were  limited  in  number  and  had 
occasionally  a  cavalheiro  pride  that  sometimes  resembled  decency,  and 
old  Pedro  II  in  particular,  whose  habit  it  was  to  keep  a  little  personal 
note-book  in  which  to  jot  down  any  lapse  from  honesty  by  a  public 
official  and  to  startle  the  man  and  his  sponsors  by  bringing  up  the 
matter  when  it  came  time  to  reappoint  him,  is  generally  admitted  to 
have  ruled  honestly  and  generously.  But  though  the  revolution  of 
1889  was  in  reality  only  another  detail  of  the  world-wide  movement 
of  the  last  century  or  two  for  bringing  the  ruling  power  down  from 
a  select  and  wealthy  class  to  the  uncultured  masses,  the  triumphant 
proletariat  does  not  appear  to  have  greatly  gained  by  the  change. 
It  is  natural  that  the  masses,  like  the  foreign  firms  struggling  to  keep 
their  heads  above  water  in  the  form  of  innumerable  taxes  and  the 
constant  hampering  of  meddlesome  officials,  should  begin  to  wonder 
whether  Brazil  is  not  mainly  suffering  from  too  much  government, 
whether  after  all  there  is  not  something,  perhaps,  in  the  contention 
of  anarchists  that  the  best  thing  to  do  with  over-corpulent  governments 
is  to  take  them  out  into  the  woods  and  shoot  them  through  the  head, 
as  something  more  burdensome  than  useful. 

One  brilliant  November  day,  perorates  a  Brazilian  editor,  a  few  hundred 
soldiers,  enthused  by  a  lucid  patriot,  destroyed  the  last  American  throne  amid 
rousing  cries  of  "Long  live  the  Republic!"  And  from  city  to  city,  from  hamlet 
to  hamlet,  these  words  rang  through  all  Brazil.  But  now,  barely  a  generation 
later,  our  armed  force  is  mainly  used  to  suppress  personal  liberties,  the  tendency 
being  constantly  toward  dictatorships;  education  of  the  people  is  given  much 
less  attention  than  is  demanded  in  a  democracy,  and  we  are  overrun  with  a 
devouring  swarm  of  politicians  who  have  lost  all  idealism  and  who  scarcely 
occupy  themselves  with  anything  but  their  personal  interests,  unscrupulously 
exploiting  the  public  coffers. 

The  tendency  toward  dictatorships  and  the  use  of  autocratic  power 
to  cover  corruption  and  aid  partizanship  was  visible  even  to  the 
naked  eye  of  the  casual  visitor.  At  the  time  I  reached  Brazil  it  was 
ruled  over,  ostensibly  at  least,  by  a  nephew  of  Deodoro,  the  first 
president.  Never,  perhaps,  had  an  administration  been  so  cordially 
hated.  "Dudii,"  as  the  populace  called  the  president,  that  being  his 
eighteen-year-old  wife's  pet  name  for  him,  was  hated  not  only  for 
himself  but  as  a  tool  of  the  "odious  gaucho"  senator  from  Rio  Grande 
do  Sul,  chief  of  the  "P.  R.  C."  or  Republican  Conservative  Party,  and 
for  some  years  the  national  boss  of  Brazil.  When  "Dudu"  became 
president,  the  popular  idol  and  fiery  orator,  Ruy  Barbosa,  only  sur- 


BRAZIL,  PAST  AND  PRESENT  211 

vivor  of  those  who  overthrew  the  monarchy,  senator  also  and  leader 
of  the  "P.  R.  L."  or  Repubhcan  Liberal  Party,  had  been  the  opposing 
candidate  and,  according  at  least  to  the  Liberal  newspapers,  had  been 
elected  by  an  overwhelming  popular  vote.  To  be  elected,  however, 
does  not  always  mean  to  take  office  in  Latin-America,  and  the  com- 
bined machinations  of  the  "odious  gaucho"  and  the  army,  in  which 
"Dudu"  was  a  field  marshal,  had  reversed  the  verdict. 

To  hold  his  own  against  the  popular  clamor  the  Marshal  had  used 
methods  taken  from  his  own  military  profession,  terminating  finally 
in  the  declaration  of  a  "state  of  siege"  in  the  federal  capital  and  that 
of  the  state  of  Rio  de  Janeiro,  Nictheroy  across  the  bay,  and  in  the 
state  of  Ceara  in  the  far  north.  On  the  surface  this  did  not  mean 
any  noted  suppression  in  the  freedom  of  life.  But  if  one  happened 
to  be  a  political  opponent  of  the  party  in  power,  or  a  newspaper 
publisher,  the  sense  of  oppression  was  distinct.  Under  the  sheltering 
wings  of  martial  law  no  articles  could  be  published  until  they  had 
been  submitted  to  a  government  censor,  whose  strictness  made  im- 
possible the  slightest  adverse  criticism  of  the  powers  that  were.  The 
suspension  of  the  right  of  habeas  corpus  made  it  possible  for  "Dudu" 
to  have  scores  of  men  thrown  into  dungeons  out  on  the  islands  in 
Guanabara  Bay  merely  because  he  or  some  of  his  followers  did  not 
hke  their  political  complexions.  If  the  friends  or  families  of  the 
victims  happened  to  find  out  what  had  become  of  them  and  got  a 
writ  of  habeas  corpus  from  the  Supreme  Court — according  to  the 
constitution  a  mandatory  order  of  release — the  government  answered, 
*'We  are  in  a  state  of  siege  and  the  constitution  is  not  working." 
It  would  be  hard  to  compute  the  full  advantage  of  this  little  ruse  to 
the  ruling  politicians,  and  the  grafting  that  went  on  under  cover  of 
such  protection  may  easily  be  imagined.  When  the  decree  was  finally 
revoked,  on  the  eve  of  a  new  administration,  the  suppressed  news 
that  flooded  the  papers  was  little  less  astounding  than  the  swarms 
of  political  prisoners  whom  government  launches  brought  back  to  the 
capital  after  months  of  imprisonment  without  any  charge  ever  having 
been  preferred  against  them. 

Outwardly,  of  course,  the  forms  of  republican  government  were 
regularly  carried  out  during  all  this  period.  Several  times  I  dropped 
into  the  Monroe  Palace  to  watch  the  House  of  Deputies  meet,  report 
no  quorum,  and  adjourn.  Once  I  went  to  the  Senate,  looking  down 
upon  that  august  body  from  a  miserable  little  stuflfy  gallery  resembling 
that  of  a  cheap  theater,  where  "any  person  decently  dressed  and  not 


212  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

armed"  had  the  constitutional  right  of  admittance — unless  the  state 
of  siege  was  invoked  against  him.  Brazil's  most  famous  orator,  late 
unsuccessful  candidate  for  the  presidency  and  the  idol  of  the  povo, 
or  collarless  masses,  was  whining  through  some  childish  jokes  and  puns 
on  the  alleged  bad  grammar  of  a  bill  destined  to  establish  a  new 
public  holiday — as  if  Brazil  did  not  already  have  enough  of  them, 
with  her  sixty-five  days  a  year  on  which  "commercial  obligations  do 
not  mature."  It  was  evident,  too,  that  the  speaker  had  by  no  means 
gotten  over  his  peevishness  at  not  becoming  president,  for  his  speech 
was  turgid  with  personalities  and  full  of  innuendos  against  "Dudu" 
and  his  fellow  scoundrels.  To  see  the  leisurely  air  with  which  the 
senate  enjoyed  this  pastime  one  might  have  supposed  that  no  more 
serious  duties  faced  the  wearers  of  the  toga. 

Brazil  is  the  only  republic  in  South  America  that  has  trial  by  jury, 
hence  her  courts  much  more  nearly  resemble  our  own  than  they  do 
those  of  Spanish-America.  I  attended  a  trial  for  murder  one  after- 
noon. Whatever  other  faults  they  may  have,  the  courts  of  Brazil 
cannot  be  charged  with  unduly  drawing  out  a  trial,  once  it  is  begun. 
The  judge  called  names  from  a  panel  of  jurors,  and  as  each  man 
stepped  forward  the  promotor,  or  prosecuting  attorney,  and  the  lawyer 
for  the  defense  looked  him  up  and  down  much  as  a  tailor  might  a  client 
and  said  "Recuso"  (I  refuse)  or  "Aceito"  (I  accept)  without  so  much 
as  speaking  to  the  man  or  giving  any  reasons  for  their  action. 
Evidently  they  were  expected  to  guess  his  acceptability  as  a  juror 
from  his  outward  appearance.  Those  accepted  took  their  seats,  and 
in  less  than  ten  minutes  the  jury  of  seven  was  chosen  and  the  trial 
had  begun.  There  are  juries  of  three  sizes  in  Brazil,  always  with 
an  odd  number  of  members,  and  these  do  not  need  to  reach  a 
unanimous  decision.  A  simple  majority  is  decisive,  though  the  larger 
the  majority  for  conviction  the  heavier  the  penalty  for  the  crime. 
Brazilian  jurors  get  no  pay,  but  they  are  fined  if  they  fail  to  answer 
to  their  names  when  called. 

A  paper  was  passed  among  the  seven  jurors,  each  of  whom  wrote 
his  name  on  it;  but  they  took  no  oath,  except  that  a  clerk  handed 
rapidly  around  among  them  a  glass  frame  inside  which  was  the 
sentence  in  large  letters,  "I  promise  to  do  my  duty  well  and  faithfully," 
and  on  this  each  laid  his  right  hand  in  silence.  There  are  so  many 
Positivists,  free  thinkers,  fetish  worshippers,  Mohammedans,  and 
other  non-Qiristian  sects  in  Brazil  that  the  Bible  and  "so-help-me- 
God"  oath  would  be  even  more  out  of  place  than  in  our  own  metropolis. 


BRAZIL,  PAST  AND  PRESENT  213 

Then  the  clerk  of  the  court,  who  had  neither  eyes,  voice,  nor  physique, 
but  was  a  mere  Hving  skeleton  humped  over  a  pair  of  trebly-thick 
glasses,  moaned  for  nearly  an  hour  through  the  entire  proceedings 
in  a  lower  court  the  year  before.  The  prisoner  was  a  youthful  Carioca, 
of  white  race  and  of  the  small  shopkeeper  or  hawker  type.  Through- 
out the  trial  everyone  addressed  him  in  a  gentle,  kindly  manner.  He 
stated  that  he  was  twenty-one,  but  had  only  been  twenty  when 
arrested,  which  the  promotor  whispered  to  me  was  merely  a  ruse  to 
get  the  benefit  of  being  a  minor.  More  than  a  year  before  he  had 
shot  a  man  of  his  own  age  in  a  downtown  street,  with  premeditation, 
he  naively  admitted.  According  to  the  degree  of  murder  proved  he 
might  be  sentenced  to  twelve,  twenty,  or  thirty  years.  There  is  no 
death  penalty  in  Brazil,  nor  will  the  Brazilian  government  extradite 
a  refugee  who  may  be  punished  with  more  than  thirty  years'  imprison- 
ment in  the  land  from  which  he  fled,  unless  that  country  agrees  not 
to  execute  him  or  exceed  that  limit  of  punishment. 

At  length  the  promotor,  who  might  easily  have  passed  for  an 
American  lawyer  in  any  of  our  courtrooms — until  he  opened  his 
mouth— began  an  address  in  the  thinnest,  weakest,  most  worn-out  voice 
imaginable — a  common  weakness  among  Brazilians  and  especially 
Cariocas,  thanks  perhaps  to  the  climate— mumbling  something  about 
a  "villainous  premeditated  crime"  several  times  before  he  took  his  seat. 
During  the  next  few  hours  he  and  the  attorney  for  the  defense,  the 
latter  in  a  wire  cage  across  the  room,  quarreled  back  and  forth,  rather 
good-naturedly  as  far  as  outward  appearances  went,  the  judge  very 
rarely  interfering.  It  was  hotter  in  the  courtroom  than  in  any 
possible  place  of  punishment  to  which  the  accused  might  be  sent, 
in  this  life  or  the  next,  and  the  entire  throng,  from  the  judge  to 
the  last  negro  loafer  in  the  far  corner,  was  constantly  mopping  its  face. 
Not  a  woman  was  included  in  the  gathering.  After  the  first  formalities 
were  over  the  trial  moved  forward  in  almost  uncanny  American 
fashion,  but  with  what  in  our  own  land  would  have  seemed  dizzy  speed, 
for  it  was  finished,  with  the  verdict  given  and  a  sentence  of  six  years 
imposed,  by  one  o'clock  the  next  morning. 

Brazilian  judges  are  reputed  not  often  to  be  open  to  actual  bribery, 
but  to  be  overrun  with  sentimentalism,  nepotism,  that  do-any  thing- for- 
a-friend  or  for  a  friend's  friend,  that  lack  of  moral  courage  necessary 
to  act  with  full  justice  when  a  personal  element  is  involved,  which 
is  a  crying  weakness  in  all  Latin-American  countries.  Striking  evi- 
dences of  this  were  frequently  coming  to  the  attention,  more  often 


214  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

in  the  interior  than  in  Rio  itself.  A  politician  in  a  city  farther  north, 
for  instance,  killed  a  man  of  little  standing,  and  went  at  once  to  report 
the  matter  to  his  bosom  friend,  the  circuit  judge.  "All  right,"  the 
judge  was  reported  to  have  replied.  "Your  sentence  is  one  day's 
imprisonment — in  my  house,"  and  when  a  warrant  for  the  assassin's 
arrest  finally  reached  him,  the  judge  marked  it  "Judgment  given  and 
sentence  served,"  and  sent  it  to  be  filed  in  the  archives.  Aside  from 
this  weakness,  the  courts  of  Brazil  seem  to  be  fair;  if  anything  they 
are  too  lenient.  Not  a  few  Brazilians  contend  that  the  jury  system 
is  not  suited  to  the  temperament  of  the  nation,  because  it  requires 
a  sterner  attitude  toward  human  frailty  than  they  can  attain.  In  fact, 
the  extreme  leniency  of  juries  is  but  another  manifestation  of  the 
liberty-license  point  of  view  of  Brazil,  the  same  weakness  that  spares 
the  rod  and  spoils  the  child.  There  were  almost  daily  examples  of 
this  attitude  of  irresponsibility,  emotionalism,  undue  compassion,  as  if 
the  jurors  considered  a  thief  or  an  assassin  at  worst  a  poor  unfortunate 
and  were  thinking  that  the  day  may  quite  likely  come  when  they 
will  find  themselves  in  the  same  boat.  A  baker  of  a  certain  large 
city  asked  a  member  of  the  Chamber  of  Deputies,  to  whom  he  had 
been  supplying  bread  for  months  without  any  suggestion  of  payment, 
to  settle  his  bill.  Being  of  foreign  birth,  the  baker  may  not  have 
known  that  openly  to  dun  a  Brazilian  is  so  great  an  insult  as  to  be 
dangerous.  The  deputy  shot  him  through  the  heart,  and  the  jur)' 
found  it  "justifiable  homicide."  A  Carioca  boy  of  fifteen,  who  had 
been  in  jail  for  a  year  charged  with  murder,  was  tried  during  my 
stay  in  the  capital.  The  whole  trial  took  place  between  one  and  twelve 
P.  M.,  and  the  accused  was  found  guilty  of  "imprudence"  and  sen- 
tenced to  fifteen  days  in  prison.  A  well-known  citizen  of  Rio  was 
assassinated  on  January  5  under  revolting  circumstances.  The  case 
finally  came  to  trial  on  the  afternoon  of  December  29;  the  court  took 
a  recess  from  seven  to  eight  for  dinner;  at  11:20  the  jury  retired, 
and  at  12 :20  there  was  brought  in  a  verdict  sentencing  the  accused 
to  ten  years'  imprisonment.  Innumerable  examples  might  be  cited, 
all  showing  extraordinary  sloth  in  bringing  criminals  to  trial,  lightning 
speed  in  dealing  with  them  when  at  last  they  are  arraigned,  and  a 
mistaken  soft-heartedness  in  punishing  them.  On  the  other  hand, 
the  state  may,  and  sometimes  does,  appeal  a  case  and  convict  a  man 
acquitted  by  an  earlier  verdict. 


CHAPTER  X 

MANNERS  AND  CUSTOMS   OF  THE   CARIOCAS 

THE  mixture  of  races  gives  Rio  a  society  very  different  from  that 
of  Buenos  Aires ;  its  elements  are  more  distinct,  more  complex, 
more  primitive,  much  less  European.  Probably  it  is  the  African 
blood  in  his  veins  even  more  than  his  Latin  ancestry  which  gives  the 
Curioca  the  emotionalism  and  the  unexpected  violences  that  often  carry 
the  individual  or  the  population  to  excesses.  The  Brazilian  character 
may  be  said  to  consist  of  Latin  sensibility  tinged  with  the  African 
traits  of  superstition,  fatalism,  slovenliness,  indiscipline,  a  certain 
happy-go-lucky  cheerfulness,  and  an  almost  total  lack  of  initiative; 
and  to  these  the  country  owes  most  of  its  social  and  economic  afflictions. 
It  would  be  unreasonable  to  expect  high  things  of  it.  The  Portuguese 
were  the  cheapest  race  in  western  Europe,  who  won  their  place  in  history 
simply  because  they  happen  to  live  on  the  sea,  and  in  the  New  World 
they  mixed  indiscriminately  and  in  a  purely  animal  way  with  the 
lowest  form  of  humanity.  The  negro  gave  the  Portuguese  more 
imagination  and  a  better  adaptability  to  the  tropics,  perhaps  an  increase 
of  cheerfulness ;  but  with  these  came  other  qualities  that  do  not  make 
for  improvement.  Though  he  is  often  quick  of  intelligence,  the 
Brazilciro  seldom  shows  continuity  of  effort  or  any  other  sturdiness 
of  character;  he  is  exceedingly  susceptible  to  flattery  and  highly  in- 
censed at  any  mention  of  the  faults  which  he  himself  sometimes 
recognizes.  Weather  appears  to  make  a  difference  in  man's  disposition, 
and  the  climate  of  Rio  does  not  seem  to  breed  what  we  call  "crankiness." 
Outwardly  the  Carioca  is  usually  good-humored  and  obliging,  with  less 
gruffness  than  the  Portcno.  Yet  it  is  evidently  not  best  for  a  man 
to  be  too  greatly  favored  by  nature;  not  only  does  it  make  him  more 
indolent,  but  he  seems  on  the  whole  to  be  less  happy  than  in  countries 
where  the  struggle  for  livelihood  demands  continuous  and  gruelling 
labor.  Though  individually  and  superficially  they  may  be  cheerful, 
the  general  air  of  a  group  of  Brazilians  is  melancholy;  as  a  character 
in  a  native  novel  of  standing  puts  it,  "they  always  seem  to  be 
discussing  a  funeral" — "or  pornographic  secrets,"  adds  another.    There 


2i6  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

are  more  suicides  per  capita  in  Rio  than  in  almost  any  other  city  in 
the  world,  and  the  finer  the  weather  the  more  there  seem  to  be 
reported  each  morning. 

That  the  Brazihan  is  superficially  courteous  and  in  his  way  kindly 
there  is  no  doubt;  yet  few  traces  of  these  qualities  are  to  be  found 
far  beneath  the  surface.  Even  if  he  protests,  he  does  so  in  soft 
language;  palavras  grossieras  under  any  provocation  are  considered 
exceedingly  bad  form  in  any  but  the  lowest  classes.  Yet  there  is  a 
distinct  suggestion  of  decadence  in  this  very  softness  of  speech,  and 
one  comes  to  long  occasionally  for  the  vigor  and  manliness  of  the 
doubled  fist.  As  fathers  the  Brazilians  have  few  equals,  in  all  truth, 
for  almost  no  other  race  on  earth  shows  more  indiscriminate  diligence 
in  peopling  it.  But  it  is  an  excellency  of  quantity  rather  than  of 
quality.  They  are  good  husbands  in  the  Brazilian  sense,  so  long  as 
the  woman  is  content  to  remain  at  home  and  raise  children  while  her 
lord  and  master  is  cultivating  similar  gardens  elsewhere.  Divorces 
are  practically  unknown  because  the  general  sentiment  of  the  country 
is  still  Catholic,  for  all  the  prevalence  of  other  theologies  and  philos- 
ophies, because  the  Brazilians  have  something  of  the  French  point 
of  view  that  the  family  is  primarily  a  business  partnership  not  to  be 
broken  up  for  such  light  reasons  as  lack  of  love  or  illicit  intercourse, 
and  because  the  country  has  no  divorce  law.  Married  sons  often  live 
with  their  parents  because  they  are  too  proud  or  too  lazy  to  go  out 
and  work — though  there  is  a  strong  family  affection  among  all  Latin- 
Americans,  in  the  long  run  the  principal  result  of  this  particular 
custom  is  bad  for  the  race.  That  the  rod  is  spared,  often  to  the 
detriment  of  the  child,  especially  of  the  boys,  there  is  no  doubt;  one 
finds  proofs  of  it  every  hour  of  the  day  in  Brazil.  The  average 
Brazilian  is  an  excellent  illustration  of  the  fact  that  mankind  must 
be  disciplined,  that  even  children  cannot  always  be  ruled  by  love  any 
more  than  they  can  be  fed  only  on  sweets,  and  the  sparing  of  the  rod 
has  had  a  very  large  and  by  no  means  always  beneficial  effect  on  the 
male  adults. 

Indeed,  there  is  far  too  much  liberty,  too  much  laissez  faire — or 
deixa  fazer,  to  use  the  native  tongue — in  Brazil,  as  in  Spanish  and 
Portuguese  life  everywhere.  No  one  in  the  country  seems  to  recog- 
nize that  liberty  may  easily  slop  over  into  license,  that  the  liberty  of 
one  may  go  so  far  as  to  interfere  with  and  even  wholly  annul  that 
of  many  others.  No  doubt  democratic  liberty  should  allow  street- 
hawkers  to  howl  the  night  as  well  as  the  day  hideous,  or  let  a  merry 


MANNERS  AND  CUSTOMS  OF  THE  CARIOCAS      217 

soul  pound  a  tuneless  piano  until  three  in  the  morning.  To  the  newly 
republicanized  Brazilians  a  law  forbidding  the  interspersing  of  brothels 
through  every  residential  district  would  no  doubt  be  "a  despotic  inter- 
ference with  our  sacred  constitutional  rights  as  citizens  and  equals," 
as  it  would  be  to  compel  the  hundreds  of  boys  selling  newspapers  in 
the  streets  of  Rio  to  learn  some  trade  or  calling,  that  later  they  may 
fmd  some  better  way  to  earn  a  living  than  by  hawking  or  thieving. 
But  it  is  the  Brazilian,  as  it  is  generally  the  South  American,  way 
never  to  correct  anyone  or  anything  unless  it  is  absolutely  unavoidable, 
until  a  confirmed  democrat  comes  to  wonder  whether  the  human  race 
must  always  have  kings  or  dictators  to  rule  over  it  rather  than  ever 
learning  to  rule  itself.  Then  one  recalls  that  Brazil  has  been  a 
democracy,  even  nominally,  only  since  1889,  and  it  is  not  so  strange 
that  she  has  not  yet  come  to  see  that  there  may  be  a  seamy  side  even 
to  liberty. 

Though  they  are  constantly  asking  for  credit  abroad,  either  collec- 
tively or  as  individuals,  Brazilians  trust  one  another  even  more  rarely 
than  do  the  average  of  Latin-Americans.  Everyw-here  are  little  hints 
of  lack  of  confidence.  The  cash  system  is  widely  prevalent,  which 
does  not  merely  mean  paying  the  moment  the  work  is  done,  but  often 
before  it  will  be  undertaken,  lest  the  client  change  his  mind  or  prove 
insolvent.  Thus  one  pays  a  dentist  before  he  fills  a  tooth,  the  doctor 
before  he  will  remove  an  appendix,  and  a  photographer  before  he  will 
undertake  to  print  one's  films.  The  mail  boxes  of  Rio  are  automatic, 
for  instance ;  the  mailman  must  shove  a  locked  bag  under  them  before 
they  will  disgorge  their  contents,  and  both  box  and  bag  lock  themselves 
as  he  pulls  the  latter  out  again,  so  that  he  never  sees  a  letter,  much 
less  gets  his  sticky  fingers  on  it.  A  judge  of  Rio  stated  publicly, 
when  a  jury  let  oflf  a  palpable  offender,  that  ninety-five  per  cent,  of 
the  fires  in  Brazil  were  set  by  the  owners  or  their  hired  agents  in 
order  to  get  the  insurance,  but  that  "there  are  so  many  artists  at  this 
crime  who  exercise  their  profession  with  such  admirable  perfection 
that  few  are  ever  convicted,  however  convinced  the  judge  and  the 
public  may  be  of  their  guilt."  His  Honor  was,  of  course,  incensed 
at  a  specific  failure  to  convict,  and  perhaps  exaggerated  somewhat, 
but  there  are  evidences  that  he  had  not  greatly  overstepped  the  truth. 

There  is  no  more  futile  occupation  on  earth  than  trying  to  save 
money  in  Rio  de  Janeiro.  It  melts  away  like  ice  under  an  equatorial 
sun;  in  fact,  money  is  of  such  slight  value  in  Brazil  that  it  seems 
foolish  to  try  to  keep  it.     Do  so  and  you  are  more  likely  than  not  to 


2i8  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

find  that  it  has  grown  even  more  worthless  next  morning  in  exchange 
for  those  things  of  real  value  which  man  needs;  that  you  have  saved 
the  cash  only  to  lose  the  credit.  Prices  were  decidedly  higher  in  Rio 
than  in  Buenos  Aires,  or  even  in  Montevideo.  A  small  glass  of  net 
very  good  beer  cost  800  reis ;  a  green  cocoanut,  that  finest  of  tropical 
thirst-quenchers,  growing  in  superabundance  along  all  the  5000-mile 
coast-line  of  Brazil,  was  considered  a  bargain  at  the  equivalent  of  a 
quarter — and  a  tip  to  the  man  who  opened  it.  The  smallest  bottle  of 
native  mineral  water  of  unquestionable  antecedents  cost  at  least  a 
milreis,  and  thirst  lurks  on  every  corner  in  sun-blazing  Rio.  Ordinary 
water?  Certainly;  if  one  cares  to  flirt  with  the  undertaker.  Every- 
thing else  was  in  proportion  to  this  most  necessary  source  of  expense. 
In  the  Seccos  e  Molhados,  "Drys  and  Wets,"  as  Brazil  calls  her 
grocery  or  provision  shops,  potatoes  sold  at  six  hundred  and  more  reis 
a  kilogram ;  butter  imported  from  Denmark  into  this  enormous  country 
of  splendid  grazing  lands  was  a  luxury  far  beyond  the  reach  of  any 
but  the  affluent.  With  the  smallest  coin  in  circulation  worth  more 
than  three  cents,  it  was  not  to  be  expected  that  prices  would  be  cut  fine. 
Moreover,  there  is  the  tendency  of  fazendo  fita.  A  Brazilian  is 
ashamed  to  admit  that  his  money  is  limited.  He  has  the  reputation, 
and  prides  himself  on  it,  of  being  a  "good  spender,"  but  this  is  not 
so  much  due  to  his  scorn  for  money  as  compared  with  the  better 
things  that  money  will  buy  as  it  is  to  the  fear  of  being  thought  less 
well-off  than  his  fellows.  Commerce  is  largely  carried  on  in  public, 
and  the  purchaser  is  thereby  forced  to  pay  more  for  dread  of  being 
seen  making  a  fuss.  He  is  afraid  to  ask  the  price  of  a  thing  before 
buying,  or  to  protest  against  exorbitance,  lest  the  by-standers  think 
money  matters  to  him — the  ally  of  the  tip-seeker  the  world  over. 
A  la  carte  restaurants  in  Rio  almost  invariably  leave  the  price-space 
on  their  menus  blank  and  bring  a  check  bearing  only  the  sum  total, 
knowing  that  the  average  client  will  not  have  the  hardihood  to  ask  for 
a  bill  of  particulars.  Even  a  Brazilian  workman  never  protests  against 
commercial  exploitation,  never  refuses  to  take  a  thing  after  he  has 
asked  for  it,  but  pays  whatever  is  demanded  as  if  it  were  a  pleasure 
to  do  so. 

Even  in  the  matter  of  prices  a  community  gets  about  what  it  demands, 
and  this  national  lack  of  protest  has  lifted  the  cost  of  living  in  Brazilian 
cities  into  the  realm  of  the  absurd.  Prices  of  almost  anything  are  out 
of  all  reason ;  the  people  seem  to  have  formed  the  habit  of  paying  high 
to  cover  the  heavy  import  and  other  duties  and  the  grafting  of  theii 


MANNERS  AND  CUSTOMS  OF  THE  CARIOCAS      219 

officials,  and  to  expect  everything  to  be  marked  up  in  the  same 
proportion.  It  seems  to  be  more  or  less  a  matter  of  pride  with  them 
that  they  pay  more  than  other  people.  Third-class  fare  from  Portugal 
to  Rio  was  55$ooo;  the  return  trip  on  the  same  ships  cost  io5$ooo. 
The  attitude  of  the  entire  population  seems  to  be  graft  and  let  graft 
pay  through  the  nose  because  you  can  make  someone  else  do  likewise. 
The  average  Brazilian  does  not  look  as  hard  at  a  32-cent  milreis  as 
most  Americans  do  at  a  dime,  or  Europeans  at  a  copper.  Rio  is  one 
place  where  Americans  can  realize  how  the  European,  earning  his 
money  with  more  difficulty  than  we  do,  feels  when  he  first  comes 
into  contact  with  our  prices. 

Numerous  proofs  may  be  found  that  the  Brazilian  is  rather  an 
imitator  than  an  initiator.  He  seldom  has  a  worth-while  idea  of  his 
own,  but  he  is  supernaturally  quick  to  grasp  those  of  anyone  else. 
A  year  or  more  before  my  arrival  a  Portuguese  opened  a  caldo  de 
canna  shop  in  aristocratic  Rua  Ouvidor.  He  set  up  a  small  cane- 
press,  stood  a  bundle  of  choice  sugarcanes  at  the  door,  laid  in  a  supply 
of  ice,  and  waited  for  customers.  They  soon  came,  for  nowhere  does 
a  novelty  take  more  quickly  than  in  Rio.  Picking  out  their  own  cane 
as  they  entered,  the  clients  caused  it  to  be  run  through  the  press,  the 
juice  straining  down  through  chopped  ice,  with  the  result  that  for  a 
tostao  they  had  a  pleasant  and  refreshing  drink.  Within  a  fortnight 
of  the  establishment  of  this  entirely  new  industry  fifteen  other  persons, 
all  Brazilians,  had  opened  caldo  de  canna  shops  in  the  three  short 
blocks  of  that  narrow,  vehicleless  shopping  street,  buying  out  the 
former  occupants  at  any  price — with  the  inevitable  result  that  within 
a  month  the  entire  clan,  including  the  originator,  were  bankrupt. 
To-day,  when  the  stroller  is  thirsty  yet  has  no  desire  to  consume 
alcohol,  he  can  get  a  glass  of  iced  cane-juice  only  in  a  few  shops  which 
make  this  a  side-line  of  their  regular  business.  This  is  one  of  hundreds 
of  similar  incidents  in  the  commercial  life  of  Rio,  and  suggestive  in 
general  of  Brazilian  business  ethics. 

A  Brazilian  proverb  has  it  that  "A  cauda  do  demonio  e  de  rendas" 
(the  devil's  tail  is  made  of  lace).  Whatever  the  scientific  exactness 
of  that  assertion,  there  is  no  doubt  that  the  Brasileiro  is  early,  often, 
and  usually  successfully  tempted  by  what  are  sometimes  vulgarly  called 
"skirts."  The  same  may  be  said  of  all  Latin-America,  but  in  Brazil 
the  undisguised  prevalence  of  irregular  polygamy  probably  reaches  its 
zenith.  Rigid,  yet  provocative,  seclusion  of  the  women,  thanks  to 
Moorish  influence,  the  former  teaching  of  the  Jesuits,  to  the  instinct 


220  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

for  self-preservation  of  the  women  themselves,  is  perhaps  as  much 
the  cause  of  this  condition  as  the  natural  polygamous  tendency  of 
the  males.  Being  an  accepted  convention  of  society  that  freedom  of 
social  intercourse  between  men  and  women  is  certain  to  lead  to  more 
intimate  relations  at  the  first  opportunity,  the  women  of  the  better 
class  are  inclosed  within  an  impregnable  wall  of  Oriental  seclusion, 
and  their  contact  with  men  is  almost  wholly  confined  to  those  of  their 
own  family  circle.  Even  the  French  find  Brazilian  family  life  un- 
reasonably circumspect.  Under  such  conditions  there  can,  of  course, 
be  little  social  or  intellectual  activity,  little  real  human  intercourse, 
and  it  is  not  surprising  that  the  eager  and  romantic  young  men  who 
find  it  impossible  to  meet  girls  of  their  own  class  without  a  cynical 
chaperon  hanging  constantly  at  their  heels  should  fall  easy  prey  to  the 
darker  skinned  and  more  accessible  members  of  the  sex,  or  to  the 
imported  demimondaines  who  flourish  in  all  the  larger  cities. 

Naturally  fecund,  and  of  strong  maternal  instincts,  the  Brazilian 
woman  unquestioningly  accepts  the  tenet  that  her  place  is  strictly  in 
the  home.  Marriage  does  not  bring  her  any  appreciable  increase  in 
freedom  over  her  closely  chaperoned  days  of  virginity.  But  while 
she  is  expected  to  conduct  herself  so  circumspectly  that  not  a  breath 
of  scandal  shall  ever  sully  the  honor  of  her  fidalgo  lord  and  master, 
the  husband  loses  none  of  his  bachelor  liberty.  The  average  Carioca 
can,  and,  above  the  laboring  class  at  least,  usually  does,  keep  a  mistress, 
and  not  only  loses  nothing  of  public  esteem,  but  little  of  that  of  his 
own  women.  In  fact,  the  politician,  the  man  of  big  business,  of 
wealth,  or  of  social  pretensions,  is  somewhat  looked  down  upon  if  he 
does  not  maintain  an  extra  household  or  two ;  failure  to  do  so  is  a  fit 
subject  for  jesting  among  his  friends  and  acquaintances.  The  subsi- 
dized companions  of  this  class  are  almost  always  European,  usually 
French,  and  preferably  blond;  rarely  are  they  native  born,  for  the 
white  and  better  class  Brazilians  guard  their  daughters  too  closely  to 
make  possible  any  irregular  approach,  and  to  take  a  "woman  of  color" 
would  seem  to  the  wealthy  Brazilian  like  buying  poor  native  perfume 
when  he  can  get,  and  all  his  friends  use,  the  best  French  product. 

But  it  is  not  so  much  the  existence  of  this  state  of  affairs  as  the 
perfect  frankness  with  which  it  is  admitted  and  carried  on  that 
astounds  the  Anglo-Saxon  stranger  in  Brazil.  Even  the  French  have 
never  attained  the  openness  and  lack  of  hypocrisy  in  the  sex  relation- 
ship which  has  been  reached  by  the  Brazilian.  Not  merely  does 
unattached  y€uth  sow  its  wild  oats  with  perfect  indifference  to  public 


MANNERS  AND  CUSTOMS  OF  THE  CARIOCAS      221 

knowledge;  heads  of  old  and  respected  families  cultivate  the  same 
crop  with  intensive,  experienced  care,  quite  as  openly.  The  Brazilian 
who  would  be  ready  to  challenge  to  a  duel  the  stranger  who  spoke 
to  one  of  the  women  of  his  family  often  brings  them  to  social  events, 
to  the  races,  to  a  patriotic  celebration,  and,  after  installing  them  in 
a  place  of  vantage,  goes  to  sit  with  his  overdressed  French  mistress, 
as  like  as  not  within  plain  sight  of  his  family,  apparently  without 
incurring  any  censure  or  even  protest  from  his  wife  and  children 
and  certainly  none  from  society. 

The  means  of  acquiring  a  mistress  of  proper  antecedents  are  varied. 
The  wealthy  and  traveled  Brazilian  brings  her  home  with  him  from 
Paris,  or  entrusts  the  commission  to  his  friends.  There  is  no  difficulty 
whatever  about  it,  no  inquisitive  federal  authorities,  no  inquiring  pro- 
tective societies,  "not  even  duty  to  pay,  though  that  is  our  chief 
import,"  as  a  cynical  editor  put  it.  If  neither  of  these  means  are 
available,  and  the  postal  service  is  incapable  of  bringing  him  a  prize, 
the  seeker  after  companionship  may  advertise  in  the  public  prints. 
Even  the  staid  old  Jornal  do  Commercio,  modeled  on  and  in  many  ways 
resembling  the  London  Times,  does  not  hesitate  to  run  dozens  of  such 
"want  ads"  every  day  of  the  year: 

A   WELL-CONDUCTED  GENTLEMAN 

Educated  and  serious,  but  with  few 
social  relations  in  the  city,  wishes  to 
meet  a  pretty  and  like-minded  girl,  in 
order  to  protect  her  secretly.  Letters  to 
this  newspaper  under  the  name  "Xip." 

PROTECTION 

A  serious  youth,  married,  independent, 
in  the  flower  of  his  years,  without  chil- 
dren, wishes  to  make  an  arrangement 
■with  a  girl  or  widow  of  good  appear- 
ance who  will  accept  a  monthly  pension. 
Reply  with  photograph  to.  .  .  . 

ADVANTAGEOUS    OPPORTUNITY 

A  distinguished  youth  who  is  not  ugly, 
who  dresses  well  and  has  a  permanent 
income,  wislies  to  meet  a  pretty  girl  of 
poor  family  who  is  in  need  of  protec- 
tion, demanding  merely  that  she  be  not 
more  than  twenty  years  old,  that  she  be 
white,  or  at  least  light-gray  (par da),  in 
color,  elegant,  of  good  education,  and 
synipathica.  He  guarantees  a  good 
standard  of  living,  and  it  might  he  that 
in  the  future  he  would  even  marry  her, 
a  thing  which  he  cannot  do  now  because 


222  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

the  laws  of  the  country  forbid  it.  It 
will  be  better  to  send  photographs. 
Letters  to  Joao  da  Silveira  at  Poste 
Restante. 

Nearly  all  advertisers  emphasize  their  seriousness  and  demand  it  in 
return,  and  the  word  "protection"  appears  in  almost  every  notice. 
Nor  is  the  weaker  sex  backward  in  appealing  for  protectors : 

PROTECIION 

A  girl  of  fine  manners  and  bringing- 
up,  aged  18,  elegant,  serious,  and  well 
educated,  will  accept  the  protection  of 
a  caz'alheiro  of  the  same  qualities,  with 
wealth. 

GIRL    OF     DISTINGUISHED    APPEARANCE 

needs  the  urgent  assistance  of  a  gen- 
tleman of  position,  distinction,  and 
good  resources,  who  will  furnish  a 
house  for  her  and  give  her  a  monthly- 
pension  of  500$000.  Letters  to  "Velda" 
in  care  of  this  newspaper. 

Naturally  those  of  less  individual  lack  of  morals  do  not  overlook 
the  opportunity  of  bringing  themselves  to  notice  in  these  columns, 
often  expressing  themselves  in  French  rather  than  Portuguese,  not  for 
the  sake  of  secrecy  but  because  those  who  read  French  are  more  apt 
to  belong  to  the  wealthier  and  better-conducted  class  to  which  the 
imported  aristocrats  of  the  easy  life  appeal: 

JEUNE   PARISIENNE 

arrivant  d'Europe,  chez  Madame  Mar- 
got,  Rua  D.  Jose  de  Barros,  n.  31. 

MLLES.     AIDA     and    CARMEN 

advise  their  friends  and  comrades  that 
they  have  removed  from  97  Ypiranga 
street  to  42  Maio,  where  they  have  es- 
tablished  themselves.     Telephone   4,406. 

YOUNG     FRENCH     GIRL 

18  years,  fresh  and  gay,  arriving  from 
Reims,  wishes  to  make  the  acquaintance 
of  several  gentlemen  curious  to  talk  over 
news  of  the  war  and  Prussian  behaviour. 

Letters   to    Mile.    H B in   care 

of  this  newspaper. 

In  addition  to  all  these  more  or  less  individual  appeals,  there  is, 
of  course,  a  plethora  of  "mulheres  da  vida" — "women  of  the  life," 
as  they  are  called  in  Brazil,  "who,"  complains  a  lone  pulchritudinous 
■^editorial  voice,  "arc  gradually  invading  all  the  arteries  of  the  city." 


MANNERS  AND  CUSTOMS  OF  THE  CARIOCAS      223 

This  class  has  almost  completely  usurped  the  first  half  mile  or  more 
of  dwellings  along  the  Beira  Mar,  facing  the  bay  and  one  of  the 
most  gorgeous  views  in  the  western  hemisphere ;  yet  the  citizens  of 
Rio  think  no  more  of  protesting  against  this  invasion  than  of  striving 
to  hinder  the  usurpers  from  drumming  up  trade  from  dusk  until  day- 
light by  repeated  trips  along  the  first  section  of  the  "Botanical  Garden 
Line."  I  am  not  of  those  who  believe  implicitly  in  our  American 
custom  of  playing  ostrich  and  concealing  our  heads  in  the  sand  of 
Mrs.  Grundy's  garden,  but  there  is  such  a  thing  as  overdoing  frankness, 
of  making  temptation  too  accessible,  of  chloroforming  public  opinion 
out  of  its  legitimate  consciousness;  and  the  ways  of  Rio  and  the 
average  Brazilian  city  do  not  indicate  that  perfect  candor  is  any 
improvement  over  our  own  secretive  and  hypocritical  treatment  of 
the  same  subject. 

There  are  other  and  more  amusing  things  to  be  found  among  the 
"want  ads"  of  Rio  newspapers.  Beggars  frequently  run  appeals  for 
assistance : 

POOR   BLIND   WOMAN 

Francisca  de  Barros  of  Ceara,  blind 
in  both  eyes,  crippled  in  one  hand,  ill, 
and  without  resources,  begs  an  alms  of 
all  good  charitable  souls,  whom  the  good 
God  will  recompense.  It  may  be  sent 
in   care   of   this   paper. 

BY   THE    WOUNDS    OF    CHRIST ! 

A  lady  who  is  ill  and  unable  to  work, 
with  a  medical  certificate  to  prove  it, 
a  tubercular  daughter,  and  without  re- 
sources to  sustain  herself,  suffering 
from  the  greatest  necessities,  comes  to 
beg  of  charitable  persons,  by  the  Sacred 
Passion  and  Death  of  Our  Lord  Jesus 
Christ,  an  alms  for  her  sustenance, 
which  God  will  recompense  to  all.  Rua 
Senhor  de  Mattosinhos  43. 

If  all  such  beggars  were  actually  ailing  or  incapacitated,  it  would  be 
less  surprising  to  find  respectable  newspapers  running  their  advertise- 
ments. But  it  has  often  been  amply  demonstrated  that  many  of  them 
are  the  most  brazen  frauds.  The  editors  of  the  same  sheets  which 
run  these  alms-seeking  petitions  admit  editorially  that  "Mendicants 
of  the  aristocratic  variety,  who  live  well,  eat  well,  and  except  at  work 
dress  well,  may  be  found  in  any  street  of  the  city  going  from  door 
to  door,  imperiously  clapping  their  hands  to  call  the  attention  of  the 
residents."     At  a  fixed  stop  of  all  "Botanical  Garden"  cars  a  young 


224  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

woman  of  slight  African  taint  and  rumpled  garments,  with  several 
children  quite  evidently  borrowed  for  the  occasion  and  frequently 
changed,  canvassed  every  car,  always  with  profitable  results;  yet  at 
her  home  in  the  outskirts  of  Ipanema  she  dressed  and  lived  like  an 
heiress.  There  are  deserving  cases,  or  at  least  unfortunate  ones, 
among  Rio's  indigent  army,  but  the  church  and  Iberian  custom  have 
trained  the  Cariocas  to  accept  begging  as  natural,  inevitable,  and  in 
no  way  reprehensible,  and  the  medieval  conception  of  charity,  that 
the  bestowing  of  largess  on  able-bodied  loafers  is  to  lay  up  favor  in 
heaven,  causes  the  giver  to  lose  little  thought  on  the  worthiness  of  the 
case  so  long  as  the  heavenly  bookkeepers  duly  record  his  action. 
The  announcements  of  "Spiritualist  Somnambulists,"  who  can 
"diagnose  the  future  in  time  to  permit  applicants  to  change  theirs 
before  it  is  too  late,"  are  legion.  One  man  ran  permanently  this  long- 
wunded  assertion : 

CURE    BY    GOD 

The  undersigned  offers  to  cure  any- 
one of  any  ailment,  cases  that  are 
despaired  of  preferred,  by  the  laying  on 
of  hands,  from  eight  in  the  morning  to 
eight  at  night,  by  a  special  power  given 
him  by  the  Almighty,  and  by  prayer  to 
the  invisible  divine  beings,  the  only  re- 
quirement being  that  those  who  present 
themselves  shall  not  be  under  the  care 
of  nor  taking  any  medicine  prescribed 
by,  a  physician,  and  that  they  have  faith 
in  the  brilliant  future  of  the  divinely 
gifted  undersigned. 

Apparently  he  had  no  connection  with  the  disciples  of  a  similar 
panacea  in  our  own  country. 

The  more  customary  "want  ads"  of  our  own  land,  of  persons  seeking 
or  sought  for  work,  are  given  a  curious  twist  in  Brazil  for  lack  of 
the  succinct  vrord  "wanted,"  which  is  replaced  by  aluga,  really  meaning 
"rents."  Thus:  "Aluga-se  uma  menina — there  rents  itself  a  girl  to 
do  housework." 

Not  the  least  curious  of  the  contents  of  Rio  newspapers  are  the 
illicit  gambling  advertisements.  The  state  and  federal  lotteries  are 
legal  and  may  advertise  as  freely  as  the  cambistas  who  sell  the  tickets 
on  the  streets  may  howl  day  and  night  hideous  with  spurious  promises 
of  easy  fortune,  but  these  official  games  reduce  competition  as  much 
as  possible  by  legal  enactments.  Some  twenty  years  ago  the  director 
of  the  Rio  Zoo  began  putting  up  daily  on  the  gate  a  picture  of  one 


MANNERS  AND  CUSTOMS  OF  THE  CARIOCAS      225 

of  the  animals  inside,  in  order  to  attract  visitors  to  the  establishment. 
A  bright  individual  recognized  this  as  a  brilHant  opportunity  to  start 
a  new  gambhng  scheme.  He  took  the  (Hrector  into  his  confidence, 
grackially  drew  crowds  to  the  gate,  and  the  illicit  lottery  that  resulted 
flourishes  to  this  day.  It  is  called  "O  Bicho,"  a  word  meaning  literally 
"worm,"  but  which  in  Brazilian  slang  applies  to  all  animals,  reptiles, 
birds,  and  even  vermin.  Twenty-five  ditTerent  "bichos"  are  used  in 
the  underground  lottery  of  Rio,  and  every  day  the  newspapers  carry 
the  notice :  "O  Bicho — For  to-morrow  .  .  .  ,"  followed  merely  by  tiny 
pictures  of,  perhaps,  a  snake,  a  rabbit,  and  a  bear.  The  game  is 
against  the  law,  yet  even  the  chief  of  police  plays  it,  and  newspapers 
cannot  be  enjoined  from  publishing  the  announcements,  because  no 
jury  has  ever  been  officially  convinced  that  they  are  not  merely 
enigmas   for  amusing  children. 

Two  points  of  superiority  Brazilian  newspapers  have  over  our  own 
— they  are  not  besmeared  with  the  alleged  "funny  pages"  of  paint-pot 
cartoonists,  nor  do  they  "feature"  divorce  cases  or  any  other  form 
of  marital  misdemeanor,  possibly  because  domesi;ic  infidelity  is  too 
commonplace  to  be  "news."  On  the  other  hand,  they  pander  to  that 
ultra-morbid  streak  in  the  Brazilian  temperament  which  African  blood 
seems  to  give  it.  Large  front-page  photographs  of  the  victims  of 
suicide  or  revolting  crimes  are  the  joy  of  Carioca  editors  and  readers, 
the  "action  of  the  crime"  being  posed  for  in  all  its  gruesome  details 
by  models  if  pictures  of  the  real  characters  are  not  available. 

Speaking  of  crimes,  there  is  a  good  police  system  in  Rio,  with 
several  excellent  departments  and  a  detective  bureau  that  makes  use 
of  the  latest  European  science  in  the  detection  and  capture  of  criminals. 
The  prevalence  of  warnings  against  "batadores  de  cartciras,"  or  pick- 
pockets, is  a  thermometer  vf  the  criminal  element.  This  class  is  so 
numerous  as  to  have  a  thieves'  slang  of  its  own,  called  "calo"  by  those 
who  use  it,  or,  in  the  pamphlet  vocabulary  published  by  the  police 
department,  "Giria  dos  Gatunos  Cariocas."  Many  of  the  expressions 
in  this  criminal  dialect  of  Rio  would  be  Greek  even  to  the  man  whose 
native  tongue  is  Portuguese,  though  a  few  of  them  are  localisms  in 
more  general  use.  Not  a  few  of  the  words  in  the  pamphlet  grew 
familiar  to  my  ear  before  I  left  Brazil.  I  learned  that  "Noah's  Ark" 
is  a  pawnshop;  to  "perform  an  autopsy"  is  to  go  through  the  pockets 
of  a  person  fallen  in  the  street ;  "to  strike  thirty-one"  is  to  die ;  a 
"bond"  (in  the  legitimate  language  a  street-car)  is  a  group  of  persons; 
to  travel  "by  Italian  bond"  is  to  go  on  foot ;  a  policeman  is  a  "button" 


226  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

or  a  "cloud" ;  a  mounted  policeman  is  "a.  four-footed  cardinal,"  and 
"convent"  means  the  Penitentiary.  To  "give  charity"  is  to  kill  a 
person  while  robbing  him ;  to  "disinfect  the  zone"  is  to  disappear 
from  a  given  haunt ;  a  patrol-wagon  is  either  a  "merry  widow"  or  a 
"chicken  coop";  a  "nose"  is  a  person  ("He  came  with  three  noses"), 
the  real  nose  being  a  "smoke-box."  A  "soft"  is  a  mattress ;  a  lawyer, 
a  "talking-machine" ;  "synagogue"  stands  for  head,  and  "Big  Papa" 
means  the  President  of  Brazil.  Naturally  money  has  many  pseudonyms 
among  the  class  that  is  always  seeking  to  lay  illegal  hands  upon  it, 
among  them  "wind,"  "light,"  and  "arame"  (literally,  brass  or  wire). 
The  expression  "falta  arame"  (brass  is  lacking)  is  widespread.  A 
ragged  youth  frequently  sidles  up  to  the  passer-by,  rubbing  his  stomach 
and  asserting,  "Falta  arame  pa'  matar  o  bicho"  (literally,  "money  is 
lacking  to  kill  the  worm")  ;  what  he  really  means  to  say  is  that  he  needs 
money  to  stop  the  gnawings  of  hunger. 

It  is  a  common  human  trait  for  those  somewhat  loose  in  their  morals 
to  be  doubly  stern  in  outward  manners.  The  Brazilian,  even  of  the 
more  haughty  class,  is  inclined  to  be  lax  at  home,  though  in  public 
outward  appearance  is  everything  to  him.  One  showy  suit  of  clothes 
for  street  and  social  wear  seems  to  leave  the  average  Carioca  willing 
to  spend  the  rest  of  his  life  in  his  underclothes.  It  is  no  unusual 
experience  when  calling  upon  a  man  to  be  asked  on  some  pretext 
to  wait  until  he  has  put  on  his  outer  garments ;  while  among  the 
VvOmen  the  wrapper  habit  extends  from  the  highest  to  the  lowest  ranks 
of  society.  The  tropical  heat  partly  accounts  for  this  sartorial  laxity, 
but  in  many  ways  it  typifies  the  national  habit  of  mind.  At  home 
the  Brazilian,  particularly  of  the  fair  sex,  can  sit  for  hours  in  that 
utterly  blank-minded  idleness  of  the  Oriental;  only  when  they  come 
out  to  stroll  the  Avenida  or  the  Ouvidor  late  in  the  afternoon  do 
most  of  the  women  put  on  real  clothes  and  dress  their  hair.  Among 
the  humbler  class,  the  negroes  and  poor  whites  of  the  morrow  and 
the  narrow  valleys  between  them,  or  of  the  one-story  tenement 
houses  known  as  cortiqos,  there  is  but  slight  sense  of  privacy  and 
much  of  the  family  dishabille  and  domestic  activities  are  freely 
exhibited  to  the  public  gaze. 

Outside  his  home  circle,  however,  the  Brazilian  is  more  than  exacting 
in  such  matters.  In  public  a  man  must  not  only  be  fully  dressed,  but 
is  somewhat  looked  down  upon  if  he  indulges  in  any  of  those  lighter 
garbs  of  the  "Palm  Beach"  variety  that  seem  so  in  keeping  with  the 
Brazilian  climate.      Especially  if  he  is  a  politician,  a  business  man. 


MANNERS  AND  CUSTOMS  OF  THE  CARIOCAS      227 

a  member  of  high  society,  or  has  a  desire  to  attain  to  any  of  these 
categories,  must  he  wear  a  heavy  dark  suit  and  under  no  circumstances 
leave  off  his  waistcoat.  To  be  without  a  coat  is  a  criminal  offense  in 
many  cities;  in  the  smallest  village  that  has  any  personal  pride,  even 
among  many  people  living  in  the  wilderness  of  the  sertdo,  it  is  atro- 
ciously bad  form.  The  man  riding  with  a  negro  functionary  in  the 
far  interior  of  the  country  must  cling  to  his  coat  if  he  would  not 
make  his  companion  an  enemy  for  life.  One  of  our  recent  presidents 
still  has  a  low  rating  in  certain  parts  of  interior  Brazil  because  he 
entered  a  mud  village  of  unwashed,  illiterate,  largely  illegitimate 
mulattoes  in  his  shirt-sleeves.  When  several  of  his  party  landed  in 
Bahia  they  were  met  by  a  courteous  policeman  and  told  either  to 
go  back  to  the  ship  and  get  their  coats  or  buy  new  ones  in  the  shops. 
Yet  in  that  very  city  hundreds  of  men  habitually  wear  no  shirt  or 
other  garment  under  an  often  wide-open  coat.  More  remarkable  still, 
while  a  man  in  his  shirt-sleeves  is  denied  admittance  to  some  of  the 
most  sorry  establishments,  it  is  entirely  comme  il  faut  for  him  to 
come  down  to  the  early  morning  meal  in  the  best  hotels  in  his  pajamas. 
The  negro  captain  of  a  little  steamer  far  up  in  Matto  Grosso  sent 
word  to  an  American  prospector  of  my  acquaintance,  who  appeared 
on  deck  in  the  latest  model  of  soft  shirt,  with  belt  and  cravat,  that 
he  must  not  leave  his  cabin  without  his  coat,  yet  the  majority  of  the 
native  passengers  were  lounging  about  in  carelessly  buttoned  pajamas 
and  kimonos,  sockless  slippers,  the  women  with  their  hair  down  their 
backs.  During  my  first  days  in  the  country  a  Brazilian  aviator  made 
the  first  non-stop  flight  from  Sao  Paulo  to  Rio,  breakmg  all  South 
American  records  for  speed  and  distance.  The  newspapers  shouted 
with  glee  at  this  splendid  feat  by  a  "son  of  the  country,"  yet  one  and 
all  commented  in  caustic  editorials  on  his  shocking  bad  taste  in  leaving 
his  coat  behind  and  landing  at  Rio  in  his  shirt  sleeves.  The  street- 
cars of  Rio  and  every  other  city  of  size  have  at  least  two  classes. 
The  fares  are  not  greatly  different,  but  unless  a  man  is  wearing  coat, 
collar,  necktie,  real  shoes — not  tamancos,  or  any  other  form  of  sandal — 
and  socks,  he  must  ride  second-class.  Nor  may  he  carry  with  him 
in  the  higher  form  of  public  conveyance  anything  larger  than  a  port- 
folio. 

Rio  gives  the  impression  of  being  overcrowded.  With  emancipation 
the  ex-slaves  flocked  into  town  in  quest  of  an  easier  livelihood  than 
that  on  the  plantations,  and  immigration  streams  clog  here.  The 
swarms  of  beggars,  criminals,  prostitutes,  hawkers    "^dult  newsboys, 


228  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

two  drivers  for  each  automobile,  the  crowds  frequently  seen  struggling 
for  jobs,  to  say  nothing  of  the  plethora  of  government  functionaries, 
suggest  an  oversupply  of  human  beings.  More  than  once  in  strolling 
along  the  wharves  I  came  upon  a  hundred  men  fighting  for  work 
where  twenty  were  needed  to  coal  or  stevedore  a  ship,  often  standing 
up  to  their  knees  in  sea-water  along  the  Caes  Pharoux  battling  for 
a  seat  in  the  tender  waiting  to  carry  the  score  to  their  labors.  Nor 
were  they  "bums"  either,  but  muscular,  honest  workmen,  nearly  all 
of  the  Caucasian  race;  while  just  across  the  way  indolent  mulatto 
government  employees  lolled  in  the  shade  of  the  customhouse  as  if 
they  had  settled  down  for  life  and  need  never  again  exert  themselves. 
A  "pull"  with  the  foreman  who  chooses  the  workmen  for  a  given  job 
is  usually  essential  to  being  taken  on,  and  he  naturally  expects  his 
"rake-off."  One  day  a  riot  broke  out  among  these  wharf  laborers; 
two  "fiscals"  of  the  stevedores'  union  were  killed  by  members  who 
claimed  they  had  been  discriminated  against ;  and  the  newspapers 
treated  the  matter  as  if  it  were  a  frequent  occurrence. 

Not  the  least  picturesque  of  the  many  strange  types  of  Rio  are  her 
street  vendors,  who  pass  all  day  long  in  almost  constant  procession. 
The  Brazilian  woman  is  not  fond  of  shopping,  or  at  least  of  going 
to  market.  She  has  the  Moorish  custom  of  keepmg  to  the  house; 
she  feels  most  comfortable  in  neglige,  and  public  appearance  requires 
elaborate  full  dress ;  nor  does  the  blazing  sunshine  invite  to  unnecessary 
exertion.  This  tendency  to  stay  home,  and  the  excess  of  men  over 
jobs,  has  given  rise  to  innumerable  street-hawkers,  who  go  from  door 
to  door,  selling  both  the  necessities  and  the  luxuries  of  life.  In  the 
early  morning,  often  before  sunrise  in  the  winter  months  of  July  or 
August,  one  is  often  awakened  by  a  cry  of  "Verdura!  Verdureirof 
and  looks  out  to  see  the  "vegetable-man"  jogging  along  under  a  load 
of  green-stuff  that  would  break  an  ordinary  man's  back.  Then  barely 
has  one  dropped  off  again  before  there  comes  a  bellow  of  "Vassoura! 
Vassoureiro!  'asooooreeeeiro!"  from  the  brush-and-broom  man,  who 
marches  by  all  but  lost  under  an  arsenal  of  potential  cleanliness,  with 
a  side-line  of  baskets  and  woven  baby-chairs  to  complete  his  conceal- 
ment. Meanwhile  from  down  the  street  comes  the  increasing  wail 
of  "'llinha!  GallniJia  Gorda!  (Chicken!  Fat  Chicken!),"  and  past  the 
iron  grilled  window  shuffles  a  barefoot  man  with  two  large  baskets  at 
the  ends  of  a  pole  over  his  shoulder,  or  on  the  back  of  a  horse  or  mule, 
offering  housewives  their  day's  roast  or  broiler.  In  Rio  people  always 
buy  their  chickens  on  the  hoof  and  avoid  the  risks  of  cold  storage. 


MANNERS  AND  CUSTOMS  OF  THE  CARIOCAS      229 

Then  conies  the  "Feixe!  Camardo!"  man,  whom  we  might  call  the  fish- 
and-shrinip  seller,  pausing  here  and  there  to  cut  up  a  hsh  on  one 
of  the  round  board  covers  of  his  two  flat  baskets.  He  disappears 
earlier  in  the  day  than  the  others,  however,  for  seafood  exposed  after 
nine  or  ten  in  the  morning  to  the  unshaded  heat  of  Rio  is  likely  to  make 
a  greater  appeal  to  the  purchaser's  olfactory  than  to  his  optic  nerves. 

Not  all  hawkers  cry  their  wares.  Some  have,  instead,  their  own 
special  noise-makers.  The  cake-and-sweetmeat  man,  with  his  large 
glass-sided  showcase  on  top  of  his  head,  strides  along,  blowing  a  whistle 
that  looks  like  half  a  dozen  cartridge  shells  of  varying  size  stuck 
together,  or  like  the  conventional  Pan's  Pipes,  and  the  shrilly  musical 
sound  these  emit  causes  every  child  within  hearing  to  canvass  its 
pockets,  parents,  or  friends  for  a  tostdo.  When  a  customer  appears 
the  cake-man  squats  from  under  his  load,  depositing  it  on  the  pair 
of  crossed  sicks  in  the  shape  of  a  saw-horse  that  he  carries  under 
one  arm,  and  the  bargaining  begins.  The  tin-man  goes  by,  carrying 
a  great  stack  of  pots  and  pans  and  calling  attention  to  his  existence 
by  shaking  a  frying-pan  fitted  with  a  clapper.  The  scissors-grinder 
stops  every  few  yards  to  bring  every  nerve  to  the  top  of  the  teeth 
by  running  an  iron  hoop  over  his  emery-wheel,  in  the  hope  of 
attracting  trade.  The  man  who  sells  plants  and  flowers  comes  along, 
incessantly  and  regularly  beating  with  a  light  stick  the  side  of  the 
blooming  box  on  his  head.  The  seller  of  azucarillas,  the  ephemeral 
sweets  of  Spain,  is  as  familiar  a  figure  as  in  the  Iberian  peninsula ; 
the  "ice  cream"  merchant  marches  about  with  what  looks  like  an 
oxygen  or  gas  cylmder  on  his  back,  playing  a  steel  triangle  to  call 
attention  to  his  little  gambling  wheel,  guaranteed  to  teach  children  to 
gamble  early  in  life  by  taking  a  chance  on  his  effervescent  delicacies. 
A  few  vendors  have  a  limited  district,  with  grouped  customers,  espe- 
cially the  bread-man  who,  with  his  great  basket  on  his  head  and  the 
stool  to  hold  it  under  one  arm,  has  only  to  station  himself  in  the  pateo, 
or  courtyard,  of  a  cortico  to  be  surrounded  by  a  clamoring  throng, 
children  snatching  the  long  loaves  faster  than  their  parents  can  buy 
them  and  rushing  excitedly  into  their  one-  or  two-room  homes  with 
the  bread  hugged  tightly  against  their  soiled  chests.  But  the  majority 
tramp  all  day  long,  some  treading  the  hot  cobbles  in  bare  feet,  some 
wearing  the  noiseless  alpargatas  of  Spain  and  Portugal,  many  scraping 
along  the  cement  pavements  in  wooden  tamancos,  invading  every  nook 
and  corner  of  the  city  and  punctuating  the  whole  day  long  with  their 
cries    and    signals.     With    rare    exceptions    they    are    Portuguese    or 


230  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Spanish — it  would  be  beneath  the  dignity  of  a  native  Brazilian  to 
carry  things  about  in  the  hot  sunshine ;  but  the  clothing  trade  is  almost 
entirely  in  the  hands  of  "Turks,"  as  South  America  calls  the  Syrian, 
who  peddles  his  wares  in  every  corner  of  the  great  republic  in  which 
the  human  race  sprouts.  In  Rio  this  perambulating  clothing-shop 
announces  himself  by  slapping  together  two  lath-like  sticks,  making 
a  noise  similar  to,  yet  entirely  distinct  from,  that  of  the  plant-and- 
flowers  man.  From  daylight  until  dark  he  plods,  to  wander  back  to 
his  noisome  little  den  when  night  settles  down  without  a  slap  left  in 
his  arm.  During  his  first  year  or  two  he  carries  his  goods  on  his  back, 
and  looks  at  a  distance  like  a  walking  department  store.  But  by  the 
second  year  he  has  usually  scrimped  enough  to  buy  an  elaborately 
decorated  chest  of  drawers  and  to  hire  a  youthful  or  newly-arrived 
fellow-countryman  to  carry  it,  while  he  wanders  along  with  nothing 
to  do  but  slap  his  sticks  together  and  engage  in  the  long-winded 
bargaining  which  is  unavoidable  in  any  financial  dealing  with  the 
Brazilian  housewives  peeping  out  through  their  window  gratings. 
But  the  "Turk"  is  a  more  clever  bargainer  than  the  best  of  them, 
and  within  three  or  four  years  he  is  almost  certain  to  have  advanced 
to  the  ownership  of  a  little  pushcart  and  by  the  end  of  five  years  it  is  a 
strange  mishap  if  he  has  not  set  up  a  shop,  become  a  local  nabob, 
and  driven  native  competitors  entirely  out  of  his  district. 

This  does  not  by  any  means  exhaust  the  list  of  vendors  who  add 
their  noises  to  the  general  hubbub  of  Rio.  No  one  who  has  spent  a 
week  there  could  forget  the  cambistas,  the  lottery-ticket  sellers  of  all 
ages  and  both  sexes  who  invade  the  inmost  privacy  with  their  raucous 
howls,  or  the  never-ending  cries  of  newsboys,  some  of  whom  spread 
their  wares  on  the  mosaic  sidewalks  of  the  Avenida  Central,  while 
others  race  in  and  out  of  the  narrow  streets  on  either  side  of  it. 
Nor  should  one  overlook,  even  if  it  were  possible,  the  creaking  of 
enormous  carts,  their  two  wheels  twelve  feet  or  more  in  diameter, 
with  which  an  immense  log  or  a  granite  boulder  is  transported  through 
the  streets  to  the  accompaniment  of  hoarse-voiced  cursing  of  the  mule- 
driver  in  charge. 

If  one  grows  weary  of  wandering  Rio's  sun-bathed  and  colorful 
avenues  and  ruas,  there  are  indoor  places  worth  seeing.  The  National 
Library,  for  instance,  is  a  magnificent  building,  at  least  in  its  material 
and  inanimate  aspects.  The  human  element  is  somewhat  less  perfect. 
The  president  himself  could  not  take  a  book  out  of  the  library ;  every- 
one knows  he  would  be  sure  to  keep  it  or  hock  it.    Being  scribbled 


MANNERS  AND  CUSTOMS  OF  THE  CARIOCAS      231 

by  hand,  the  card  catalogue  is  by  no  means  easily  legible ;  it  is  set  so 
near  the  floor  that  the  reader  of  American  height  all  but  breaks  his 
back  in  reaching  it,  and  there  are  so  many  authors  of  the  same  name 
that  to  hunt  up  a  given  one  is  a  serious  task.  Then  there  is  a  splendid 
Brazilian  system,  evidently  imported  from  Portugal  or  some  still  less 
respectable  region,  under  which  directories,  biographies,  and  the  like 
are  always  arranged  in  alphabetical  order  according  to  the  first  name. 
Let  us  suppose  that  the  only  Brazilian  opera  of  any  importance, 
"O  Guarani,"  is  soon  to  be  given  in  the  Municipal  Theater,  and  that 
you  wish  to  know  something  about  the  man  who  wrote  it.  The  an- 
nouncement mentions  that  his  name  is  Gomes.  You  enter  the  sump- 
tuous hall  of  the  library,  hat  in  hand,  wait  for  the  negro  attendant 
and  his  white  bosom  companion  to  stop  gossiping  and  give  you  a  hat 
check,  then  you  climb  to  the  next  floor  and,  doubled  up  like  a  jack- 
knife,  claw  through  the  catalogue  until  you  get  the  serial  number  of 
a  biographical  dictionary  in  many  volumes,  containing  the  life  story 
of  the  "Most  Illustrious  Brazilians" — of  whom  there  seem  to  be 
millions.  Having  filled  out  a  "bulletin"  explaining  which  book  you 
wish  to  consult,  giving  author,  title,  the  date,  the  "number  of  the 
set,"  the  "indication  of  the  catalogue,"  your  own  name,  address,  and 
other  detailed  personal  information  back  to  the  fourth  generation, 
you  enter  the  sumptuous  reading-room.  Or,  more  exactly,  you  wait 
patiently  at  the  door  thereof  until  you  are  handed  a  scnha,  a  slip  of 
paper  which  gives  you  the  right  to  enter  and — if  you  can  still  produce 
it — to  exit.  That  in  hand,  you  choose  a  seat  and  write  the  number  of 
it  on  the  "bulletin,"  hand  this  to  the  gossiping  tar-brushed  attendant, 
and  go  and  sit  down.  The  attendant  finishes  his  gossip,  looks  at  the 
slip,  and  carefully  puts  it  under  a  book  on  his  desk.  By  and  by  he 
ends  another  gossip,  picks  up  the  book,  is  astonished  to  find  a  slip 
under  it,  reads  it  carefully,  and  puts  it  under  another  book  on  another 
part  of  the  desk.  Meanwhile  you  cannot  go  to  look  up  the  books  you 
might  want  to  read  at  some  future  date,  because  you  cannot  leave 
the  reading-room  without  giving  up  your  scnha  with  the  attendant's 
"o.k."  on  it.  You  cannot  bring  along  a  book  of  your  own  to  read 
meantime,  because  any  Brazilian  knows  that  you  would  bring  some 
worthless  pamphlet  and  manage  to  exchange  it  for  a  valuable  library 
volume.  There  is  nothing  to  do  but  sleep,  or  study  the  scattering 
of  fellow-sufferers  in  the  reading-room,  where  you  are  sure  to  be 
struck  by  the  absence  of  women.     An  old  maid  did  enter  the  library 


232  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

one  day  while  I  was  there,  but  she  was  stared  at  so  steadily  that 
neither  she  nor  the  men  in  the  room  did  any  reading. 

Finally,  if  this  happens  to  be  your  lucky  day,  it  may  occur  to  the 
attendant  to  put  your  book-slip  into  the  automatic  tube  at  his  elbow 
and  send  it  off  to  the  stacks.  When  the  employees  at  that  end  of 
the  tube  get  through  discussing  politics  or  the  lottery  and  send  the 
book  back  by  automatic  carrier,  along  with  the  "bulletin"  signed  by 
the  man  who  "executed  the  request,"  a  negro  attendant  wanders 
over  to  your  seat  with  it.  Then  you  quickly  discover  that  though  the 
huge  volume  is  devoted  to  everything  from  "Gl"  to  "Gy"  there 
is  not  a  single  Gomes  in  it.  This  rather  surprises  you,  since  Gomes 
is  as  widespread  in  Brazil  as  Smith  in  the  United  States  or  Cohen  in 
New  York,  and  at  least  one  of  that  name  must  have  been  illustrious 
at  least  in  the  Brazilian  sense.  But  by  this  time  it  is  four-thirty,  and 
the  library  takes  a  recess  at  five— that  is,  everyone  is  ejected  and  the 
doors  locked  by  that  hour — so  you  give  it  up. 

Next  day  you  discover  quite  by  accident,  your  eyes  having  fallen 
upon  a  frieze  at  the  "Theatro  Phenix,"  that  the  musician's  name 
was  Carlos  Gomes.  As  soon  as  the  library  opens— at  ten  in  theory  and 
about  ten-forty  in  fact— you  hasten  back  and  go  through  the  same 
tape-wound  misery  again  to  get  the  fourth  volume  of  illustrious 
Brazilians,  and  wallow  for  hours  through  pages  upon  pages  of 
"Carlos"  without  finding  a  single  one  of  them  answering  to  the  name 
of  Gomes.  Days  afterward,  when  the  opera  has  come  and  gone,  a 
Carioca  acquaintance  casually  remarks  that  the  man  who  wrote  it  was 
Antonio  Carlos  Gomes,  but  that  he  never  used  the  first  name!  Back 
to  the  library  to  flounder  once  more  in  the  ubiquitous  red  tape,  and 
late  that  evening  you  grasp  the  "A"  volume  of  illustrious  Brazilians 
and  finally  at  nine-thirty— Eureka !  "Antonio  Carlos  Gomes,  Paulista, 
musician,  born  in  Campinas,  and  .  .  ."  and  just  then  you  are  "put 
into  the  eye  of  the  street,"  for  the  library  closes  at  ten  and  no  Bra- 
zilian ofificial  is  so  absurd  as  to  let  the  closing  hour  catch  him  still 
in  the  act  of  closing.  Wandering  homeward  or  out  along  the 
Avenida  you  muse  on  how  convenient  it  would  be  if  strangers  in  our 
Congressional  Library  had  to  look  up  the  28th  president  of  the 
United  States  under  the  name  "Thomas." 

Though  at  least  two-thirds  of  the  people  of  Brazil  do  not  read  or 
^vrite— more  than  half  because  they  cannot  and  the  rest  because  they 
have  no  occasion  or  no  desire  to  do  so — Brazilians  of  the  small 
"upper"  class  are  more  cultured  in  the  narrow,  bookish  sense  of  the 


MANNERS  AND  CUSTOMS  OF  THE  CARIOCAS      233 

word  than  the  average  American  of  similar  rating.  "Everyone" 
knows  everyone  else  in  this  restricted  little  circle  in  Rio,  and  they 
retain  many  of  the  old-fashioned  opinions  and  manners  of  the  days 
when  the  capital  was  called  "the  court"  and  was  overrun  by  the 
locust  swarm  of  courtiers  from  the  old  world.  I^mhracing  is  still  the 
knightly  form  of  greeting  between  males  in  this  higher  Fluminense 
society,  where  it  is  the  custom  for  a  man  to  kiss  a  lady's  hand — or 
glove — upon  being  presented,  and  in  which  young  men  often  give 
iheir  fathers  similar  marks  of  recognition  in  returning  from  or 
departing  on  a  journey  of  any  length.  Many  of  this  caste  are  still 
monarchists,  at  least  at  heart,  though  they  usually  find  it  to  their 
advantage  outwardly  to  acquiesce  in,  or  even  to  show  enthusiasm 
for,  the  new  form  of  government. 

I  attended  several  "social  functions"  in  Rio — always  from  a  dis- 
creet distance,  "a  mocidadc,"  which  is  the  same  foppi.sh  muster  of 
youthful  "intellectuals"  that  is  known  as  "7a  jiwcntiid"  in  Spanish- 
America  or  "la  jeunesse  doree"  in  France,  was  trying  to  establish 
a  "Little  Theater"  for  the  exclusive  use  of  the  elite,  "with  a  view  to 
rehabilitating  our  histrionic  art,  so  debilitated  to-day."  Now  and  then 
they  perpetrated  amateur  plays  which  fortunately  were  not  exposed 
to  the  scorn  of  the  general  public.  One  afternoon  they  arranged  a 
"literary  program"  for  the  purpose  of  raising  a  monument  to  Arthur 
Azevedo,  Brazilian  dramatist  and  writer  of  clever  but  salacious  short 
stories.  It  began  at  four  in  the  handsome  new  "Theatro  Phenix," 
usually  sacred  to  the  "movies."  and  actually  got  started  shortly 
before  five.  Being  primarily  a  social  event,  there  were  only  four 
of  us  up  in  the  gallery.  On  the  stage  below,  two  young  men  in  ultra- 
correct  afternoon  dress,  creased  to  the  minute,  displayed  themselves 
to  a  select  female  audience  in  recitations  from  Arthur's  stories 
(edited)  and  plays,  with  extravagant  and  unnatural  gestures.  A  self- 
confident  lady  who  was  just  recovering  from  being  young,  moaned 
through  half  a  mile  of  something  in  French — what  this  had  to  do 
with  the  glory  of  Arthur  I  did  not  catch,  high  up  under  the  eaves, 
unless  it  was  meant  to  show  how  well  the  elite  of  Rio  have  copied 
Parisian  manners — and  finally  there  was  given  a  one-act  play  by  the 
same  monumental  author,  which  might  have  been  very  funny  had 
the  acoustics  of  the  house  permitted  us  gallery  slaves  to  catch  more 
than  the  reflected  mirth  of  the  audience.  Through  it  all  a  dozen  of 
"our  greatest  literary  geniuses"  pranced  about  the  stage  before  the 
admiring  audience  on  one  excuse  or  another,  while  two  photographers 


234  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

toiled  assiduously  taking  flashlights  from  all  possible  angles  of  the 
correctly  creased  afternoon  trousers. 

Still  another  day  found  me  at  a  soiree  musicale  in  the  old  "Theatro 
Lyrico,"  back  of  its  newer  and  more  aristocratic  municipal  successor. 
This  rather  breathless  old  barn  was  the  principal  theater  of  Brazil 
under  the  monarchy,  and  still  retains  unchanged  the  imperial  loge, 
a  whole  furnished  apartment  in  Louis  Philippe  style.  There  was  only 
a  slight  negro  strain  in  the  audience,  but  the  orchestra  of  fifty  pieces 
ran  the  whole  gamut  of  human  complexions.  The  recital  by  a  pianist 
still  in  her  teens  easily  made  up  for  all  the  tedium  I  had  undergone 
in  attending  other  "social  functions"  in  the  Brazilian  capital.  As 
Senhorita  Guiomar  Novaes  has  since  won  high  praise  in  our  own 
land  and  in  Europe,  I  am  pleased  to  find,  in  my  notes  on  that  day's 
performance  the  prophecy,  "Here  at  least  is  one  Brazilian  who  will 
prove  of  world  caliber." 

One  of  the  points  that  distinguish  Brazil  from  Spanish-America 
is  its  divergencies  of  religion.  Here,  too,  the  church  got  in  on  the 
ground  floor.  As  early  as  1590  the  Benedictine  monks  founded  a 
monastery  on  the  summit  of  the  Morro  Sao  Bento ;  soon  afterward 
the  Capucines  established  themselves  on  top  of  the  IMorro  do  Castello, 
and  in  general  the  churchmen  showed  great  predilection  for  the  high 
places  of  Rio,  perhaps  to  get  that  much  farther  away  from  the  wicked 
world.  For  centuries  Rome  ruled  Brazil  with  her  customary  profit- 
able sternness.  Scarcely  two  centuries  ago  Protestants  attempting 
to  spread  their  propaganda  in  the  country  were  roughly  treated,  and 
priests  publicly  burned  in  the  pragas  of  Bahia  and  other  cities  the 
Bibles  and  tracts  offered  by  American  and  other  colporteurs.  To 
this  day  and  in  the  cathedral  of  Rio  itself  one  may  find  evidences  of 
medieval  fanaticism — women  of  the  poorer  class  making  the  circuit 
of  the  church  on  their  knees,  or  kissing  everything  in  sight,  including 
floor,  walls,  and  all  the  wounds  of  a  life-size  plaster-of-Paris  crucifix 
under  a  thin  shroud.  A  few  of  the  hilltops,  too,  are  still  sacred  to 
the  cloistered  life,  but  the  church  has  lost  much  of  its  monopoly 
and  is  much  less  militant  and  omnipresent  than  on  the  West  Coast. 
It  is  the  custom  of  Brazilian  men,  even  in  street-cars  or  trains  going 
full  speed,  to  raise  their  hats,  often  in  unison,  when  they  pass  a  funeral 
or  a  cemetery ;  but  the  same  reverence  in  passing  a  church  door  is 
by  no  means  so  general,  and  is  usually  confined  to  the  part-negro 
portion  of  the  population.     Indeed,  it  is  almost  unusual  to  meet  a 


MANNERS  AND  CUSTOMS  OF  THE  CARIOCAS      235 

priest,  monk,  or  nun  in  the  streets  of  Rio,  and  politically  the  church 
is  almost  an  outcast. 

Yet  the  capital  pulsates  with  many  religions.  The  transplanted 
faiths  of  the  many  races  that  make  up  the  modern  Carioca  are  so 
numerous  that,  if  we  may  believe  a  native  writer,  "every  street  has  a 
different  temple  and  every  man  a  different  belief."  There  are  several 
sects  of  African  fetish  worshippers,  Methodists,  Maronites,  Baptists, 
Physiolatras,  Presbyterians,  Satanists  or  worshippers  of  the  devil, 
Congregationalists,  "Drinkers  of  Blood,"  "Brothers,"  Adventists,  Jews, 
followers  of  the  "black  mass,"  Swedenborg  disciples  of  the  New  Je- 
rusalem, exorcists,  literary  pagans,  saccrdotistas  of  the  future,  de- 
scendants of  the  Queen  of  Sheba,  worshipers  of  the  sea,  and  defenders 
of  many  other  exotic  dogmas,  not  to  mention  a  large  building  back 
of  the  Avenida  Central  occupied  by  the  "A.C.M."  (Associagdo  Christao 
de  Mogos),  in  other  words,  the  Y.M.C.A.  As  far  away  as  the  Uru- 
guayan border  I  had  heard  an  unfrocked  priest  lecture  on  one  of  the 
newer  faiths  of  Brazil  and  was  astonished  to  hear  the  loud  and  general 
applause  whenever  he  made  a  thrust  at  the  fanaticism  or  immorality 
of  South  American  priesthood.  Up  in  the  Andes  he  would  have 
proceeded  along  that  tack  in  public  for  about  two  minutes  before 
having  a  pressing  engagement  with  the  undertaker.  In  Santa  Maria 
my  astonishment  was  as  great  when  I  passed  an  imposing  Protestant 
stone  church  on  one  of  the  principal  streets  and  heard  the  minister 
— speaking  his  Portuguese  with  a  thick  German  accent — openly  preach- 
ing his  particular  doctrine  to  a  large  Brazilian  congregation.  Free- 
dom of  worship  reigned  indeed ;  in  that  morning's  newspaper  there 
was  a  complaint  from  a  town  not  far  away  that  it  could  get  no  mail 
from  Friday  until  Monday,  because  its  postmaster  was  an  "Advcntista 
do  7°  Dia!" 

The  cult  of  the  sea  is  found  chiefly  among  the  colonies  of  fishermen 
scattered  about  Guanabara  Bay.  Some  of  these  will  under  no  cir- 
cumstances leave  the  sea  or  its  beaches.  Their  children  swim  at  two 
and  go  fishing  with  the  adults  at  ten.  The  moon  enters  considerably 
into  their  fanaticism,  and  their  veneration  for  and  fear  of  the 
"Mother  of  Water"  is  inferior  only  to  their  dread  of  the  police,  before 
whom,  or  in  the  presence  of  non-conformists,  they  pretend  to  be 
strict  Catholics.  One-fifth  of  all  the  spiritualist  propaganda  in  the 
world  is  published  in  Brazil,  according  to  a  native  who  made  an 
investigation  of  the  question.  This  superstition  is  so  widespread  that 
men  high   in  government  and   business  circles   have  been  known  to 


236  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

refuse  to  take  a  street  car  which  the  rabble  has  left  empty  because 
"it  is  full  of  bad  spirits."  Synagogues  are  numerous  in  Rio,  for  there 
is  a  large  Jewish  colony,  running  through  all  the  gamut  of  society 
as  well  as  of  commerce,  and  widely  varying  in  orthodoxy  and  religious 
rites.  There  are  rich  Jews  in  business  along  the  Avenida  who  spend 
their  winters  "playing  the  markets"  and  their  summers  up  in  Petropo- 
lis.  In  the  less  showy  streets  live  swarms  of  poor  Armenian,  Mo- 
roccan, Russian,  Austrian,  Turkish,  French,  English,  German,  Arabian, 
and  even  African  Jews,  all  engaged  in  their  customary  occupation  of 
buying  and  selling  something  or  other.  About  the  Praga  Tira- 
dentes  and  in  its  radiating  ruas  seethe  Jewish  women  of  the  streets  and 
their  male  companions  and  exploiters,  the  caftenes,  from  all  the 
ghettoes  of  Europe. 

There  are  said  to  be  more  than  eighty  thousand  Syrians  in  Brazil, 
of  whom  by  no  means  all  wander  through  the  streets  slapping  together 
a  pair  of  sticks.  Down  about  the  Rua  da  Alfandega  and  the  lower 
point  of  the  city  "Turks"  own  important  business  houses;  in  the 
colony  are  clever  craftsmen  and  even  a  few  doctors,  politicians,  and 
journalists.  More  than  half  the  Brazilian  Syrians  are  Maronite 
Christians  from  the  Lebanon ;  the  rest  are  orthodox  Mohammedans  of 
somewhat  lower  social  strata,  who  earn  their  primitive  livelihood  as 
carregadorcs,  carriers  of  mankind's  material  burdens,  as  shop-servants, 
and  as  petty  peddlers.  Though  many  of  these  "Turks"  find  the 
difference  in  language  a  great  barrier  to  their  native  loquacity  as 
bargainers,  their  qualities  are  near  enough  those  of  the  Brazilians 
to  cause  them  to  fit  quickly  into  their  environment. 

Mohammedanism  is  not  confined  to  the  Syrians  in  the  religious 
medley  that  characterizes  the  capital  of  Brazil.  Thousands  of  former 
slaves  are  more  or  less  followers  of  the  Prophet  of  Medina,  though 
barely  aware  of  it  themselves.  The  negroes  shipped  out  to  Brazil 
in  the  olden  days  were  from  many  little  nations  scattered  through 
the  far  interior  of  Africa;  hence  their  religions  were  as  varied  as 
their  tongues.  But  just  as  the  general  language  of  that  continent, 
the  eubd,  suffices  for  simple  conversation  throughout  Africa  or  among 
the  blacks  of  Rio,  so  the  negro  religions  practiced  in  the  Brazilian 
capital  may  be  roughly  divided  into  two  general  classes.  The  alufas 
are  more  or  less  Mohammedan,  with  a  background  of  African  super- 
stitions; the  orixds  are  a  still  more  primitive  sect  upon  which  the 
influence  of  the  prophet  was  never  brought.  Outwardly,  of  course^ 
nearly  all  the  blacks  are  good  Catholics,  but  their  saints  and  gods 


MANNERS  AND  CUSTOMS  OF  THE  CARIOCAS      237 

have  been  crossed  with  those  of  the  church  until  it  is  a  wise  negro 
who  knows  an  African  from  a  Cathohc  deity.  Then,  too,  the  unadul- 
terated fetish  worship  imported  with  the  slaves  still  persists,  and 
Obeah  and  voodoo  practices  sometimes  give  evidence  of  their  exist- 
ence. According  to  a  reputable  native  writer  there  are  in  the  every- 
day crowd  that  surges  through  the  Avenida,  medicine  men,  magicians, 
voodoo  chiefs,  fciticeiros  who  will  agree  to  mix  a  love  philter  or  to 
bring  misfortune  upon  an  enemy  by  mumbling  an  incantation  over 
a  concoction  of  rat  tails,  cat's  head,  finger  and  toe  nails,  and  the  inno- 
cent passer-by  would  never  dream  what  absurd  African  rites  are 
taking  place  behind  more  than  one  commonplace  fagade.  There  are 
"holy  men"  living  in  the  very  heart  of  Rio  surrounded  by  a  swarm  of 
servant-women  with  whom  they  live  in  polygamy  as  in  the  wilds  of  the 
black  continent,  yet  many  of  whom  dress  for  public  appearance  quite  like 
their  Christian  fellow-countrymen,  play  "bicho,"  and  die  leaving  to 
their  heirs  many  contos  of  reis.  Negro  Brazilians  who  know  French 
and  even  English,  who  have  been  educated  abroad  and  have  in  some 
cases  becorr.e  senators,  or  presidents  of  states,  "men  to  whom  I  lift 
my  hat  and  with  whom  I  shake  hands,"  in  the  words  of  the  native 
investigator,  still  cling  secretly  to  the  old  African  superstitions.  There 
are  rich  Brazilians  who  send  their  sons  to  Africa  to  study  the  religions 
of  their  forefathers,  and  traffic  between  Rio,  Bahia  and  Pernambuco 
and  several  West  African  ports  is  heavy. 

Most  conspicuous  of  the  non-Catholic  sects  of  Brazil,  thanks  less 
to  their  numbers  than  to  their  political  power  and  high  intelligence. 
are  the  Positivists.  Auguste  Comte,  a  Parisian  mathematician  who 
spent  part  of  his  life  in  an  insane  asylum  and  the  rest  in  penning 
voluminous  explanations  of  a  "positive  philosophy"  which  even  the 
mathematical  mind  seems  to  find  difficulty  in  comprehending,  suffered 
the  customary  fate  of  the  prophet  in  his  own  country.  "Paris," 
according  to  his  Brazilian  disciples,  "was  not  prepared  for  so  ad- 
vanced a  doctrine."  In  most  other  countries  he  won  only  scattered 
followers — George  Eliot  and  her  lover  were  among  them — but  in 
Brazil  his  doctrine  not  only  survives  but  seems  likely  to  increase 
its  standing  before  it  goes  the  way  of  other  'isms.  Positivist  propa- 
ganda began  in  Brazil  during  our  Civil  War,  but  was  some  time  in 
getting  a  footing.  Finally  the  "Littreists"  Miguel  Lemos  and  Teixeira 
Mehdes  became  converts,  the  former  becoming  the  head  of  the  sect 
in  Brazil  and  the  latter — now  his  successor — his  chief  lieutenant.    But 


238  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

it  was  Benjamin  Constant  Botelho  de  Magalhaes  who  raised  Positivism 
to  a  political  force,  first  teaching  it  more  or  less  secretly  in  the  Military- 
School  and  combining  with  it  the  demand  for  a  republican  form  of 
government  until,  in  1889,  the  sect  joined  with  the  army  in  overthrowing 
the  monarchy.  The  Brazilian  Positivists  credit  themselves  with  estab- 
lishing the  republic,  separating  the  church  from  the  state,  reforming 
the  teaching  and  criminal  codes,  and  many  lesser  accomplishments. 

Strictly  speaking  Positivism  does  not  pretend  to  be  a  religion  but 
merely  a  "philosophy  of  life."  Yet  it  bears  many  reminders  of  the 
Puritanical  and  reforming  sects  so  numerous  in  our  own  land.  Posi- 
tivists advocated  the  abolition  of  slaves ;  they  are  opposed  to  the 
lottery;  they  demanded  an  easier  form  of  civil  marriage  in  the  hope 
of  cutting  down  illegitimate  unions — in  other  words,  they  combine 
religion  and  morals,  which  are  so  completely  divorced  in  the  ruling 
church  of  South  America.  They  are  popularly  reputed  to  be  opposed 
to  the  use  of  coffee  or  tobacco  and  to  take  that  "blue  law"  view  of 
life  into  which  our  Puritan  virus  shows  frequent  tendencies  to  degen- 
erate, but  this  they  claim  to  be  mere  ridicule  or  counter-propaganda 
of  their  enemies. 

I  arranged  by  a  "want  ad"  to  exchange  English  for  Portuguese 
lessons  with  a  well-educated  native  of  Rio,  who  turned  out  to  be 
a  government  functionary  and  a  Positivist.  Possibly  the  most  striking 
thing  about  him  was  his  almost  Protestant  moral  code,  contrasted 
with  his  genuinely  Brazilian  tolerance  in  practice.  He  saw  nothing 
reprehensible  in  cheating  the  public  out  of  more  than  half  the  time  and 
effort  which  they  paid  him  to  deliver ;  he  asserted  that  he  and  Brazil- 
ians in  general  believed  their  wives  certain  to  betray  them  if  given  the 
opportunity,  and  refused  to  credit  my  statement  that  the  average 
American  husband  does  not  consider  eternal  vigilance  the  price  of 
his  domestic  honor.  Yet  often  in  the  same  breath  he  pronounced 
some  Positivist  precept  that  would  fit  snugly  into  the  code  of  our 
sternest  sects. 

I  accompanied  my  student-tutor  one  Sunday  morning  to  the  prin- 
cipal weekly  service  at  the  Positivist  Apostulado,  or  "Temple  of 
Humanity"  in  the  Rua  Benjamin  Constant.  It  is  an  imposing  building 
in  the  style  of  a  Greek  temple,  said  to  be  copied  from  the  Pantheon 
of  Paris.    On  the  facade  is  the  Positivist  motto  in  large  bronze  letters : 

O  Amor  por  Principio 
E  a  Ordem  por  Baze 
O  Progresso  por  Fim. 


MANNERS  AND  CUSTOMS  OF  THE  CARIOCAS      239 

Inside,  the  almost  luxurious  edifice,  "sea-green  in  color,  as  if  one 
were  bathed  in  hope,  and  with  the  high  ceiling  essential  to  lofty 
thoughts,"  still  somewhat  resembles  a  Catholic  church.  Around  the 
walls  of  the  nave  are  fourteen  "chapels"  containing  as  many  busts, 
each  representing  one  of  the  "saints"  of  Positivism  and  an  abstract 
idea.  They  are  Moses — Initial  Theocracy;  Homer — Ancient  Poetry; 
Aristotle — Ancient  Pliilosophy;  Archimedes — Science;  Caesar —Mili- 
tary Civilization;  St.  Paul— Catholicism;  Charlemagne — Feudal  Civili- 
zation ;  Guttenberg — Modern  Invention  ;  Dante — Modern  Epic  ;  Shake- 
speare— Drama ;  Descartes — Modern  Philosophy  ;  Frederick  the  Great — 
Modern  Politics ;  Bichat — Modern  Science,  and  lastly,  Eloise,  or  Femi- 
nine Sanctification.  It  would  be  easy,  of  course,  to  quarrel  with  the 
Positivists  on  several  of  their  choices  as  world  leaders,  were  they  of 
a  quarrelsome  disposition.  These  personages  also  give  their  names 
to  the  fourteen  months  of  the  Positivist  calendar,  which  begins  with 
the  French  Revolution.  Among  the  decorations  are  the  "flags  of  the 
five  nations" — Brazil,  China,  Turkey,  Chile  and  Haiti !  Only  two  South 
American  countries  are  represented  because  "these  are  unfortunately 
the  only  ones  in  which  the  Positivist  faith  as  yet  counts  fervid  adepts." 
China  wins  place  as  the  "most  vast  nation  of  the  Orient ;"  Turkey  as 
the  "most  cultured  people  of  the  East"  (  !),  and  Haiti  is  admitted  "in 
honor  of  the  greatest  of  negroes,  Toussaint  L'Ouverture,"  whose  por- 
trait is  the  only  non-Caucasian  face  among  the  many  about  the  walls. 
There  are  of  men  of  all  ages  and  nations,  whom  the  Positivists  con- 
sider of  world  importance, — Camoes,  Lavoisier,  Cervantes,  St.  Gall, 
Cromwell,  and  many  others,  the  only  American  among  them  being 
an  atrocious  chromo  print  of  Washington.  Higher  still,  in  decorative 
letters  and  the  simplified  spelling  of  Positivist  Portuguese,  are  scattered 
the  words, — Space,  Industry,  Architecture,  Painting,  Earth,  Music, 
Poetry,  Politics,  Proletariat,  Priesthood,  Monotheism,  Astrology,  Fam- 
ily, Humanity,  Patriotism,  Fetishism,  Polytheism,  Woman,  Morality, 
Sociology,  Biology,  Soil,  Chemistry,  Physics,  Astronomy,  Logic.  Above 
what,  for  want  of  a  better  name,  might  be  called  the  altar  or  the  main 
chapel,  runs  the  inscription : 

"Vergine  Madrc  Amen  te  plus  quam  me  nee  me  nisi  propter  te." 

No  Catholic  church  was  ever  more  crowded  with  images  than  the 
"Temple  of  Humanity."  In  fact,  the  more  closely  one  looked  the  more 
did  certain  forms  and  beliefs  of  Catholicism  peer  through  the  outward 
modem  mantle  of  Positivism,  as  if  either  the  founder  or  his  disciples 


240  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Iiad  not  been  able  to  divest  themselves  entirely  of  their  inherited  faith 
The  most  Catholic  beata  in  South  America  could  scarcely  have  shown 
greater  reverence  for  the  sacred  pictures,  graven  images,  and  "relics  of 
the  faith"  with  which  the  temple  was  crowded.  Above  the  "pulpit" 
was  a  bust  of  Comte  on  a  column,  its  upper  portion  covered  with  green 
cloth  embroidered  with  white  silk  "by  one  of  our  young  female  prose- 
lytes." Portraits  of  Comte  and  his  mistress,  Clothilde  de  Vaux— both 
painted  in  China  and  depicting  them  with  almond  eyes— hung  in  the 
main  chapel,  where  there  were  also  paintings  of  each  of  them  on  the 
death  bed.  Pictures  of  the  Bastille,  of  Dante  and  Beatrice,  of  the 
Sistine  Madonna  surmounted  by  a  cross,  "because  she  was  an  ardent 
Catholic,"  were  among  the  many  which  a  roving  eye  gradually  dis- 
covered. Most  astonishing  of  all  was  the  likeness  of  "Humanity,"  a 
virgin  figure  with  the  features  of  Clothilde  de  Vaux,  dressed  as  a 
bride,  with  a  green  band  at  her  waist  and  holding  in  her  arms  a 
pretty  boy  who  grasped  a  handful  of  daisies  and  pansies,  the  Positivist 
flowers,  and  gazed  up  into  the  woman's  face,  the  whole  patently 
inspired  by  the  Catholic  madonnas  which  it  closely  resembled.  In  the 
background  were  the  Pantheon  and  Pere  Lachaise  cemetery,  where 
Comte  is  buried. 

Like  all  religions,  the  new  creed  already  tended  to  harden  into  set 
forms,  the  failure  to  carry  out  which  was  evidently  a  more  grievous 
5in  than  the  disobeying  of  the  general  principles  of  the  order.  Their 
veneration  of  pictures  of  the  dead  was  almost  medieval;  the  railing 
of  the  tomb  of  Clothilde  had  been  brought  from  Paris  and  as  much 
fuss  was  made  over  it  as  ever  devout  peasants  did  over  the  shin-bone 
of  a  saint;  "first  sacraments"  were  administered  in  the  temple;  "the 
faithful"  were  urged  to  visit  the  "sacred  places  of  Positivism;"  they 
had  a  substitute  for  crossing  oneself,  "a  sacred  formula  of  our  faith 
in  which  it  is  customary  for  all  believers  to  stand  up  out  of  respect  for 
Our  Master."  There  was  even  a  hint  of  Mohammedanism,  a  mark 
in  the  cement  floor  of  the  porch  under  the  pillars  indicating  the  direc- 
tion of  Paris— the  thought  of  Paris  as  a  sacred  city  was  a  trifle  startling 
—"toward  which  all  Positivistic  Temples  should  have  their  principal 
axes." 

In  the  basement  of  the  temple  was  a  printing  plant  from  which  issues 
a  constant  stream  of  Positivist  pamphlets,  books,  biographies  of  Benja- 
min Constant,  and  similar  forms  of  propaganda.  Here,  too,  is  the 
original  flag  of  republican  Brazil,  painted  in  crude  colors  on  pasteboard 
by  order  of  Teixeira  Mendes.    The  story  of  its  designing  is  not  without 


MANNERS  AND  CUSTOMS  OF  THE  CARIOCAS      241 

interest.  Having  been  assigned  the  task  by  the  leaders  of  the  revolution, 
the  present  head  of  the  Positivists  of  Brazil  determined  to  keep  the 
general  form  of  the  existing  national  banner.  Joao  VI  had  given  the 
kingdom  a  coat-of-arms  set  in  a  golden  sphere  on  a  blue  background. 
Mendes  changed  the  blue  to  green,  basic  color  of  the  Positivist  banner 
and  meant  also  to  symbolize  the  tropical  vegetation  of  the  land,  as  the 
yellow  sphere  does  the  gold  in  its  soil.  Then  he  called  in  an  astronomer, 
and  taking  the  twenty  principal  stars  of  the  southern  firmament  at 
noon  of  November  15,  1889,  to  represent  the  twenty  states  of  Brazil, 
he  placed  nineteen  below  the  equator-like  band  across  the  golden  sphere, 
and  one  above  it  to  indicate  that  part  of  the  country  north  of  the 
equator,  or  of  the  Amazon.  The  sphere  was  inclined  on  the  horizon 
according  to  the  latitude  of  Rio,  the  tobacco  and  coffee  on  the  old  royal 
coat-of-arms  were  removed,  as  "mere  commercial  things  not  fit  for  a 
place  on  the  national  banner,"  and  along  the  equatorial  band  was 
run  a  line  from  the  Positivist  motto. 

The  women  of  the  congregation  sat  on  a  platform  in  front  of  the 
"altar"  rail,  the  men  down  in  the  body  of  the  "church."  Women 
should  love  Positivism,  according  to  its  disciples,  for  it  dignifies,  ven- 
erates, and  raises  them  to  their  due  elevation.  The  "3rd  of  Gutten- 
berg"  on  which  the  temple  was  dedicated  is  also  the  "Feast  of  Woman" 
day,  on  which  Positivists  celebrate  the  "transformation  of  the  cult  of 
the  Catholic  Virgin  into  the  cult  of  Humanity."  Teixeira  Mendes, 
long  the  head  of  the  sect  in  Brazil,  sat  in  the  "pulpit"  beneath  the 
bust  of  Comte  and  "preached,"  if  his  unsermon-like  remarks  uttered 
in  a  weak,  thin  voice  barely  heard  through  an  immense  white  mus- 
tache may  be  so  called.  His  diminutive  form  was  covered  by  a  dark 
robe,  with  a  green  cord  about  the  neck  and  embroidered  with  the  Posi- 
tivist flowers.  The  "sermon"  emphasized  the  Positivist  conception 
of  the  "virgin  mother"  as  combining  the  two  great  qualities  of  the 
feminine  type, — purity  and  tenderness.  Like  many  other  religions, 
this  modern  creed  clings  to  the  legend  of  a  virgin  mother.  As  the 
gathering  marched  out  to  the  tune  of  the  "Marseillaise,"  I  asked  my 
cicerone  to  explain  the  frequent  recurrence  of  the  "virgin  mother" 
motif  in  temple  and  sermon.  He  replied  that  it  was  the  Positivist 
belief  that  humanity  would  gradually  be  educated  up  to  the  point 
where  "woman  will  be  able  to  reproduce  alone,  without  the  necessity 
of  'sin'  with  man !" 


CHAPTER  XI 

STRANDED  IN    RIO 

I  HAD  long  expected  far-famed  Rio  to  be  the  climax  and  end  of 
my  South  American  wanderings.  Portuguese  civilization  had  never 
aroused  an^y  great  interest  wnhin  me;  a  glimpse  of  Brazil,  with 
possibly  a  glance  at  Venezuela  on  my  way  hwrtie,  to  complete  my  ac- 
quaintance with  the  former  Spanish  colonies,  seemed  a  fituu^  conclu- 
sion of  a  journey  that  had  already  stretched  out  into  almost  thret 
years.  When  I  had  "fiscalized"  the  "Botanical  Garden"  street-car 
line  for  nearly  a  fortnight,  therefore,  and  seen  the  chief  sights  of  the 
Brazilian  capital,  I  began  to  think  of  looking  into  the  question  of  getting 
back  to  the  United  States. 

Contrary  to  my  earlier  expectations,  it  would  not  be  necessary  to 
sign  on  as  a  sailor  or  stoke  my  way  across  the  equator.  With  my 
unanticipated  salary  of  six  thousand  a  day  and  by  dint  of  long  ex- 
perience in  side-stepping  high  prices,  I  had  succeeded  in  clinging  to 
the  equivalent  of  a  hundred  dollars  from  my  consular  earnings,  as  a  re- 
serve fund  for  this  last  emergency.  With  that  munificent  sum  on  hand, 
I  might  even  scorn  the  long-familiar  steerage  and  treat  myself  to  a 
second-class  passage  on  any  of  the  steamers  sailing  frequently  from 
Rio  to  New  York. 

Unfortunately  I  had  not  been  keeping  my  ear  to  the  ground.  Years 
of  care-free  wandering  in  those  sections  of  the  earth  where  life  is 
simple  and  in  which  man  learns  to  depend  chiefly  on  himself  had 
caused  me  to  overlook  certain  characteristics  of  the  more  complicated 
world  I  was  rejoining.  There  even  a  vagabond  is  only  to  a  limited 
degree  a  f\3€,  agent.  The  reserve  fund  I  had  unexpectedly  saved 
from  the  maw  of  Brazilian  profiteers  was  in  paper  milreis  and  as  one 
had  been  able  for  more  than  a  d?-ade  to  turn  300$ooo  into  twenty 
English  gold  sovereigns  at  will,  I  had  neglected  to  do  so  at  once.  On 
the  bright  "winter"  morning  of  Saturday,  the  first  of  August,  I  strolled 
out  of  my  modest  hotel  and  along  the  Avenida  Central  with  my  habitual 
air  of  a  care-free  man  of  unlimited  leisure— almost  instantly  to  recog- 
nize that  there  was  something  strange  in  the  wind.  Before  the  offices 
of  the  Jornal  do  Commercio  and  the  Jornal  do  Brazil  were  gathered 

242 


STRANDED  IN  RIO  243 

seething  crowds,  eagerly  spelling  out  the  voluminous  bulletins  in  their 
windows.  I  paused  to  read  with  them.  Some  one,  it  seemed,  had 
kicked  over  the  balance  of  power  in  Europe  and  France  and  Russia  had 
decided  to  try  to  give  Germany  the  trouncing  for  which  she  had  so 
long  been  spoiling. 

The  news  came  to  me  out  of  a  tropically  clear  sky.  I  did  recall 
having  glanced  at  a  brief  newspaper  paragraph  somewhere  during  my 
journey  northward  from  Uruguay,  to  the  effect  that  some  prince  of 
Austria  and  his  consort  had  been  killed  at  a  Serbian  town  of  which  I 
had  never  heard;  but  I  had  known  other  assassinations  of  Europeans 
of  high  degree  to  blow  over  without  a  war  resulting.  Squabbling  was 
always  going  on  in  the  Balkans  anyway.  Pessimists  had  it  that  there 
was  going  to  be  a  long  and  a  real  war ;  in  common  with  all  other  wise 
men  of  the  period  I  smiled  condescendingly  at  the  silly  notion. 

Yet  here  were  very  decided  rumors  of  war.  !Maps  were  already 
appearing  in  the  windows  of  newspaper  offices,  with  scores  of  black  and 
red-headed  pins  on  them  to  show  the  advance  of  the  various  armies. 
The  flurry  might  not  amount  to  much,  but  it  was  high  time  I  turned  my 
paper  milreis  into  real  money,  bought  my  ticket,  and  got  out  of  this 
temperamental  country  before  something  serious  really  did  happen. 
I  strolled  on  and  dropped  into  one  of  the  countless  "exchange"  booths 
that  flourish  in  and  about  the  Avenida  Central.  Handing  out  my  three 
hundred  thousand  reis  I  requested  the  man  inside  to  hand  me  back 
twenty  gold  sovereigns.  He  looked  at  me  scornfully,  pointed  to  a 
small  paragraph  in  the  newspaper  under  my  elbow,  and  went  on  paint- 
ing a  sign  on  a  piece  of  cardboard.  Perusing  these  I  learned  the  as- 
tounding news  that  the  milreis,  which  had  been  rated  fifteen  to  the 
English  sovereign  as  far  back  as  men  with  average  memories  could 
recall,  had  dropped  overnight  to  twenty-three  to  the  pound !  In 
other  words  of  the  same  profane  nature,  my  hundred  dollars  had 
dwindled  in  a  few  hours,  merely  on  the  strength  of  a  bit  of  news  from 
squabbling  Europe,  to  about  seventy.  I  refused  to  be  "done"  in  that 
fashion.  It  was  merely  the  old  familiar  trick  of  bankers  who  were 
taking  advantage  of  a  temporary  scare  to  rob  the  garden  variety  of 
mankind  of  our  hard-won  earnings.  In  a  day  or  so  honesty,  or  at 
least  competition,  would  prevail,  and  my  three  hundred  milreis  would 
be  worth  more  nearly  their  honest  value  again.  I  repocketed  them  and 
decided  to  wait  until  the  exchange  moderated — and  two  days  later  my 
seventy  dollars  was  worth  less  than  sixty ! 

It  may  seem  ridiculous  that  a  man  with  three  hundred  thousand  in 


244  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

his  pocket  should  worry — at  least. to  those  who  do  not  know  Brazil, 
her  currency,  her  prices,  and  her  profiteers.  But  I  began  to  feel  uneasy. 
Not  merely  was  the  money  I  had  by  superhuman  efforts  saved  to  carry 
me  home  calmly  melting  away  in  my  pocket  without  even  being  touched, 
but  before  long  touching  became  unavoidable.  In  less  time  than  would 
have  seemed  possible  a  third  of  my  miserable  bills  had  disappeared. 
Even  if  I  got  away  at  once,  I  should  have  to  go  straight  home  without 
stopping  at  Venezuela,  and  if  I  did  not  hurry  I  should  not  get  home 
at  all.  I  raced  to  the  steamship  offices — only  to  get  a  new  shock.  Not 
only  had  the  value  of  my  money  been  cut  in  two,  and  a  third  of  it  used 
up,  but  the  price  of  steamship  tickets  had  suddenly  and  mysteriously 
doubled,  and  only  English  gold  was  accepted.  If  I  could  have  jumped 
upon  a  steamer  that  day,  I  could  still  have  paid  for  a  third-class  passage. 
But  there  was  no  boat  due  for  three  days,  and  there  were  good  chances 
that  this  would  be  several  days  late ! 

The  air  was  full  of  war-bred  excitement.  Before  it  was  announced 
that  England  had  declared  war,  the  British  cruiser  that  had  been  lying 
in  the  harbor  for  nearly  a  week  with  her  fires  up  was  out  stopping  and 
searching  all  traffic  along  the  coast.  Several  ships  flying  the  German 
flag  were  anxiously  awaiting  orders  in  the  bay,  little  realizing  that  their 
last  voyage  under  that  banner  was  over.  Another  German  vessel  for- 
cibly put  ashore  fifty  Russian  steerage  passengers  who  had  embarked 
in  Buenos  Aires  with  all  their  savings,  generously  giving  them  back 
one-third  the  money  they  had  paid  for  passage  to  Europe.  Detachments 
of  rifle-bearing  Brazilian  policemen  patrolled  the  wharves  to  preserve 
order  between  the  various  nationalities.  The  German  consul  general 
had  ordered  all  Germans  on  the  reserve  list  in  Brazil  to  report  to  the 
nearest  consulate  prepared  to  sail  for  home.  German  reservists  poured 
into  the  capital  from  the  southern  states  until  it  was  only  by  climbing 
over  a  score  or  so  of  them  that  I  could  reach  my  room,  into  which  two 
of  them  had  been  thrust.  A  standing  client  of  the  hotel,  a  business 
man  of  some  standing  and  education,  presumed  upon  our  slight  ac- 
quaintance to  insist  one  evening  that  I  walk  out  with  him.  As  we 
stood  before  the  bulletin-blinded  window  of  the  Jornal  do  Brazil  with 
its  pin-spotted  map  of  Europe,  my  companion  gloated  loudly  over 
each  piece  of  news : 

"In  two  veeks  ve  are  in  Parees !  I  go  mineself  to-morrow  morning 
to  offer  me  to  der  gonsul.  Oh,  py  Gott,  ven  only  Eng-lant  stop 
noytral,  ven  only  Eng-lant  stop  noytral !" 

Unfortunately,  from  the  German  point  of  view,  England  did  not 


STRANDED  IN  RIO  245 

"stop  noyfral,"  and  a  few  days  later  the  German  reservists  began  drift- 
ing back  to  the  facendas  and  clmcaras  from  which  they  had  been  called. 

A  twelve-day  holiday  was  declared  by  the  government,  so  that  even 
those  who  had  money  in  the  banks  were  as  badly  ofl  as  I,  and 
as  the  value  of  the  milreis  went  steadily  downward,  prices  went  sky- 
rocketing. Day  after  day  I  invaded  every  steamship  office  in  Rio,  without 
distinction  as  to  race,  color,  or  customary  rascality.  I  took  captive  ever)- 
ship's  captain  who  ventured  ashore,  offering  to  do  anything  for  my 
passage  from  shoveling  coal  to  parading  the  poop  with  his  wife's  pet 
poodle.  Nothing  doing!  Even  if  a  ship  did  now  and  then  lift  anchor 
and  sneak  away  in  the  general  direction  of  the  United  States,  there 
were  crowds  of  would-be  passengers  with  vastly  more  influence,  and 
far  more  mesmerism  over  the  root  of  evil,  than  I,  who  were  quite 
as  willing  to  do  anything  within  the  pale  of  respectability  to  reach 
"God's  country."  I  might,  of  course,  have  cabled  home  for  passage 
money.  There  were  one  or  two  persons  in  my  native  land  who  prob- 
ably had  both  the  wealth  and  the  confidence  required  to  answer  properl}- 
to  such  an  appeal.  But  I  had  long  since  made  it  a  point  of  honor 
that  when  I  got  myself  in  a  hole  I  should  get  out  again  without  scream- 
ing for  a  rope. 

Psychologists  as  well  as  mere  world  roustabouts  will  probably  admit 
that  the  more  nearly  penniless  a  man  is  the  more  ready  is  he  to  "take 
a  chance."  His  condition  cannot  be  worse,  and  it  may  suddenly  become 
much  better.  A  vagabond  evidently  is  subject  to  the  same  laws  as  more 
respectable  members  of  society.  At  any  rate,  with  only  a  few  milreis 
left,  I  grew  bold  and  instead  of  squeezing  the  last  loaf  of  bread  out  of 
them,  I  squandered  them  for  lottery  tickets.  On  the  following  Saturday 
there  was  to  be  a  "drawing  extraordinary,"  with  the  first  prize  nothing 
less  than  a  hundred  million  reis !  With  that  amount  I  might  even 
buy  a  steamer  for  the  trip  home;  besides,  I  had  long  wished  to  know- 
how  it  feels  to  be  a  multimillionaire.  Even  in  real  money  and  at  normal 
exchange  a  hundred  million  reis  reached  the  respectable  sum  of 
$325,000,  and  though  Brazilian  shin-plasters  had  dropped  to  half  their 
pre-war  value,  though  every  "piece"  of  ticket  must  pay  a  commission 
to  the  vendor  and  must  bear  the  ubiquitous  "consumption"  tax  in  the 
form  of  a  stamp,  though  the  government  takes  five  per  cent,  of  all 
winnings  and  loads  down  the  lucky  ticket-holder  with  so  many  other 
stamps,  taxes,  and  grafts  that  it  requires  a  lawyer  to  dig  him  from 
under  them,  there  would  still  remain  the  price  of  the  bridal  suite  on  any 
steamer  plying  the  east  coast  of  South  America. 


246  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

A  crowd  of  mainly  collarless  and  rather  vacant-faced  men  and  wo- 
men, who  for  many  years  had  been  chasing  that  will  o'  the  wisp 
called  the  winning  number  by  buying  a  "piece"  of  ticket  whenever  pos- 
sible, were  already  gathered  in  and  about  the  frontless  shop  down 
behind  the  main  post-office  of  Rio  when  I  reached  it.  No  small  number 
of  them  were  plainly  so  carried  away  by  visions  of  what  they  were 
going  to  do  with  their  winnings  that  they  had  played  hooky  and 
jeopardized  their  real  source  of  income.  Even  I  felt  the  subtle  breath 
of  hope,  fed  mainly  on  ardent  desire,  that  swept  through  the  sour- 
scented  throng  as  the  formalities  began.  Five  little  girls  in  spotless 
white,  but  of  several  shades  of  color— as  if  the  officials  in  charge  had 
sought  to  have  every  complexion  of  their  clients  represented — stood 
behind  as  many  whirligigs  fitted  with  the  figures  from  o  to  9.  Every 
twenty  seconds  the  girls  gave  these  a  simultaneous  whirl,  and  when 
they  stopped  the  number  indicated  by  the  five  figures  visible  to  the 
audience  was  called  out  by  an  official  in  the  front  row.  Then  another 
girl  thrust  a  hand  into  a  globe-shaped  urn  and,  with  averted  face,  drew 
out  a  wooden  marble  on  w^hich  was  engraved  the  conventional  signs 
for  a  sum  of  money.  That  represented  the  amount  of  the  prize  for 
the  number  just  w^hirled,  and,  like  it,  was  called  out  and  then  written 
down  three  times  on  as  many  printed  slips  by  dozens  of  men  and 
boys  seated  around  the  walls  of  the  room,  some  of  them  government 
officials,  some  representatives  of  the  various  lottery  agencies. 

There  are  at  least  fifty  prizes  at  eacli  drawing,  ranging  all  the  way 
from  about  the  price  of  a  ticket,  the  occasional  winning  of  which 
keeps  the  disgruntled  clients  from  abandoning  the  game,  up  to  the 
capital  prize.  The  deadly  sameness  of  the  process  made  the  formality 
a  soporific  which,  combined  with  the  tropical  heat  and  the  fetid  breath 
of  the  multitude,  soon  left  me  drowsily  leaning  against  my  compact 
neighbors.  Time  and  again  some  insignificant  prize  was  announced 
and  set  down  by  the  scribes  around  the  walls,  until  I  began  sleepily 
to  wonder  if  the  hundred  million  ball  had  inadvertently  been  left  out 
of  the  urn.  When  the  "cent  contos  de  reis"  was  at  last  droned  out  by 
the  wooden-voiced  announcer  in  the  same  bored,  monotonous  tone  with 
which  he  had  so  often  mentioned  the  equivalent  of  a  dollar,  my  thoughts 
were  wool-gathering  and  it  was  not  until  a  flutter  went  through  the 
crowd  that  I  recognized  the  significance  of  the  announcement.  I 
glanced  at  the  ticket  in  my  hand,  then  at  the  number  on  the  whirligigs. 
Proctector  of  the  Penniless!  They  were  the  same — at  least  the  first 
three  numbers  on  them  were!    An  African-pated  blockhead  of  unusual 


STRANDED  IN  RIO  247 

height  blotted  the  last  two  of  those  on  the  platform  out  of  my  field 
of  vision.  I  shouldered  him  aside,  treading  under  foot  a  few  immedi- 
ate bystanders.  The  surge  of  pleasure  that  was  mounting  my  spine 
turned  to  angry  disgust.  The  last  two  figures  were  not  even  near 
enough  my  own  to  give  me  the  "approximation"  prize.  With  my 
usual  carelessness  and  stupidity  I  \.^u.  o^aght  the  wrong  ticket,  and 
the  glamor  of  being  a  multimillionaire  faded  to  the  real  but  familiar 
experience  of  being  "dead  broke"  in  a  foreign  land.  My  disappoint- 
ment was  evidently  widespread,  for  the  tightly  packed  throng  began 
instantly  to  melt  away  like  molasses  from  a  broken  jug,  so  that  by  the 
time  I  reached  the  street  there  were  hundreds  of  other  glum- faced  indi- 
viduals shuffling  off  in  both  directions.  Only  then  did  I  realize  that  the 
cambio  in  which  I  had  spent  my  last  milreis  was  quite  fittingly  named 
"Sonho  do  Ouro"—\ht  "Golden  Dream." 

But  at  least,  if  one  must  be  stranded,  there  were  few  finer  spots  than 
Rio  to  be  stranded  in.  I  returned  to  my  sight-seeing  duties  on  the 
street-cars,  and,  by  dint  of  outwitting  the  German  proprietor  of  my 
hotel  that  evening,  managed  to  save  enough  of  that  day's  six  thousand 
to  run  an  appeal  next  morning  in  the  two  principal  newspapers  of  the 
capital.  In  all  frankness  it  should  have  been  lachrymose,  but  I  had  long 
since  learned  that  a  bold  and  boastful  manner,  with  a  facetious  tinge, 
is  more  likely  to  bring  real  results: 

American  Writer  and  Explorer,  uni- 
versity graduate,  widely  traveled  but 
still  young,  knowing  fluently  Spanish, 
French,  and  German,  and  understand- 
ing Portuguese  and  Italian,  being  ma- 
rooned here  by  tlie  present  situation, 
will  accept  temporarily  any  reasonable 
employment,  in  Rio  or  the  interior,  of 
sufficient   interest   to   pass   the   time. 

With  no  available  means  of  moving  on,  I  had  time  for  anything — 
except  to  be  bored. 

That  very  evening  I  came  within  an  ace  of  getting  employment  with- 
out even  waiting  for  replies  to  my  printed  appeal — or  at  least  I  came 
as  near  it  as  did  the  suitor  who  would  have  been  accepted  but  for  the 
slight  matter  of  the  answer  being  "no"  instead  of  ")'es."  The  first 
Brazilian  singer  ever  heard  in  grand  opera  in  Brazil  was  announced  to 
appear  at  the  Municipal  Theater,  and  with  that  splendid  sense  of 
propriety  for  which  the  Latin-American  is  noted  he  had  chosen,  or  been 
chosen,  to  make  his  debut  before  his  admiring  fellow-countrymen  as 
the  hero  of  Puccini's  "Girl  of  the  Golden  West."     The  ticket  speculators 


24B  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

were  out  in  full  force  when  I  scuffed  my  way  down  the  mosaic-paved 
Avenida,  but  their  machinations  were  naturally  of  little  interest  to  a 
man  who  could  not  rub  two  coppers  together.  What  had  won  ray 
attention  was  rather  a  rumor  that  a  group  of  stage  cowboys  was  needed, 
and  as  my  worst  enemy  could  not  have  failed  to  admit  that  I  came  more 
nearly  looking  that  part  than  anyone  else  wandering  the  streets  of  Rio, 
here  was  my  opportunity  to  behold  at  close  range  the  Brazilian  mis- 
conception of  the  American  wild  west  and  its  bloodthirsty  denizens; 
besides,  the  twQ  milreis  paid  to  "supers"  looked  good  to  me.  A  verita- 
ble mob  of  loafers,  rowdies,  and  gatunos  surged  back  and  forth  in 
the  narrow  street  behind  the  theater,  sweeping  down  upon  the  fistless 
old  "master  of  supers"  as  often  as  he  ventured  outside  the  stage  door. 
Several  times  he  fled  in  dismay,  but  at  length,  when  the  opera  was 
about  to  begin  and  the  marshaling  of  cowboys  was  imperative,  he 
ventured  forth  with  the  air  of  a  man  who  is  taking  his  life  in  his 
hands  and  began  letting  his  selections  be  thrust  upon  him.  I  foot- 
balled  my  way  through  the  crowd  that  was  swinging  to  and  fro  with 
his  every  footstep  and  offered  my  services.  My  wide-brimmed  felt 
hat  alone  should  have  won  me  a  place.  The  harried  functionary 
glanced  at  me,  mumbled  something  to  the  effect  that  I  did  not  in  the 
least  fit  the  part,  and  finally  retreated  within  the  stage  door,  followed 
by  a  motley  collection  of  spindle-shanked  Carioca  street  loafers  who 
would  have  made  an  ideal  background  to  a  melodrama  set  in  a  tar- 
brushed  Whitechapel. 

Hardly  was  my  last  milreis  gone  when  exchange  improved  and 
Brazilian  money  came  halfway  back  to  normal.  The  inevitable  profi- 
teer had  already  grasped  his  opportunity,  scattered  groups  of  populares 
took  to  mobbing  the  shops  that  had  most  flagrantly  boosted  food  prices, 
and  though  even  the  courts  did  not  function,  because  of  the  twelve- 
day  holiday,  the  government  was  finally  compelled  to  take  advantage 
of  the  state  of  siege  to  punish  a  few  of  the  most  heartless  offenders 
and  publish  a  list  of  prices  which  could  not  be  exceeded  without  loss 
of  license  and  possible  imprisonment.  But  the  ways  of  the  Brazilian 
are  devious,  and  no  great  improvement  was  accomplished.  The  semi- 
military  police,  their  rifles  loaded  with  ball  cartridges,  patrolled  not 
only  those  parts  of  town  in  which  the  various  European  nationalities 
might  meet,  but  wherever  disgruntled  bands  of  the  povo  were  likely 
to  gather.  It  would  probably  not  have  been  difficult  to  start  a  revolu- 
tion in  Brazil  during  those  eventful  days. 

Meanwhile,  not  an  answer  dirl  I  get  to  my  stirring  call  for  employ- 


STRANDED  IN  RIO  249 

ment,  except  an  offer  to  become  a  combination  doorkeeper  and  office- 
boy,  which  I  did  not  consider  interesting  enough  even  to  pass  the  time. 
It  was  after  three  of  a  blazing  afternoon  that  I  rode  out  in  my  official 
capacity  to  Ipanema,  where  I  had  found  behind  a  mass  of  rocks 
a  little  cove  in  which  no  bathing-suit  was  needed.  There  was  a 
marvelous  private  beach,  and  a  rock-walled  dressing-room  where  only 
a  stray  negro  wench  might  see  me  if  she  chose  to  look,  but  from  which 
I  could  see  the  tips  of  the  Corcovado  and  the  "Sugar  Loaf,"  and, 
across  the  turquoise  bay,  silhouetted  at  this  hour  against  the  sun  side 
of  the  sky,  box-shaped  Gavea,  hazy  blue  with  distance. 

I  had  ridden  halfway  back  to  town  when  I  looked  up  from  reading 
one  of  Brazil's  epics  and  caught  sight  of  the  back  of  a  head  that  looked 
familiar.  The  hat  above  it  and  the  coat  below  I  had  certainly  never 
seen  before,  and  I  could  make  out  little  of  the  face,  but  that  little 
merely  increased  my  conviction.  By  the  time  we  had  passed  the  tunnel 
I  decided  to  make  sure  and,  moving  up  close  behind  the  man,  I  pro- 
nounced ?.  name  in  a  mild  voice  that  would  probably  not  have  attracted 
attention  if  it  were  not  the  right  one.  The  man  turned  around  quickly, 
then  thrust  out  a  hand.  As  I  had  suspected,  he  was  Raymond  Linton, 
not  only  a  fellow-countryman  but  a  fellow-statesman,  whom  I  had  last 
seen  in  Buenos  Aires. 

A  year  before,  Linton  had  acquired  the  Spanish-American  concession 
for  Edison's  recently  invented  "Kinetophone,"  or  "talking  moving- 
pictures,"  and,  having  played  before  all  the  uncrowned  heads  of  Peru, 
Chile,  Uruguay,  and  the  Argentine,  was  still  operating  two  separate 
outfits  of  this  theatrical  novelty  in  the  last  two  of  those  countries. 
The  entertainment  had  taken  so  well  in  Spanish-America  that  he  had 
purchased  the  rights  for  Brazil  also,  and,  having  left  Buenos  Aires 
on  the  last  day  of  July,  little  suspecting  what  the  world  had  in  store 
for  itself,  he  was  planning  to  start  a  third  outfit  in  Rio  de  Janeiro. 

"But  I  'm  in  tough  luck,"  said  Linton,  after  our  preliminary  greetings 
and  immediate  personal  history  had  ended, 

"How  come?"  I  asked,  rather  idly,  to  tell  the  truth,  for  my  thoughts 
were  still  chiefly  on  my  own  predicament. 

"You  remember  my  B.  A.  manager?"  he  replied.  "Splendid  fellow 
and  just  the  man  I  needed  to  handle  the  proposition  up  here  in  Brazil 
as  soon  as  I  get  it  started.  But  he  is  a  P'renchman,  and  the  day  after 
I  sailed  he  was  called  home  to  join  the  army.  So  now  I  've  got  to  rush 
back  to  B.  A.  to  keep  that  end  going,  and  I  have  a  brand  new  outfit, 
with  special  films  in  Portuguese  and  a  man  fresh  from  the  Edison  plant. 


2SO  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

landing  to-day  from  the  States.  This  man  knows  all  the  mechanical 
and  electrical  part  of  the  job  to  perfection,  but  he  probably  never 
heard  of  the  Portuguese  language  and  could  n't  tell  a  Brazilian  from 
an  honest  man.  So  I  am  mighty  hard  up  for  someone  to  take  charge 
up  here,  and  I  don't  know  where  on  earth  T  'U  find  another  Mlow  like 
the  Frenchman. 

"By  Jove !"  he  went  on  a  moment  fater,  as  the  street-car  swung  out 
upon  the  Beira  Mar,  "I  wish  you  felt  like  staying  down  here  six  months 
or  sc  longer.     1  'd  make  you  a  proposition." 

''For  instance?"  I  asked,  merely  out  of  idle  curiosity.  *T  will  not 
spend  another  month  in  South  America  under  any  circumstances,  but 
I  may  have  to  in  spite  of  myself." 

"If  I  could  get  a  man  who  knows  the  South  American  from  spats 
to  hair-oil  as  well  as  you  should  after  three  years  down  here,"  went 
on  Linton  with  great  earnestness,  "I  'd  offer  him  a  salary  and  a  per- 
centage, guaranteeing  that  he  would  not  get  less  than "  naming  a 

considerably  larger  sum  than  I  had  ever  been  paid  as  a  respectable 
member  of  society — "a  month,  with  all  his  actual  traveling  expenses, 
first  class,  all  arrangements  to  be  in  U.  S.  currency,  to  take  charge 
of  the  Brazilian  end  of  this  business  and  play  in  every  city  of  over 
fifteen  thousand  population  in  the  country — there  are  about  fifty  of 
them — and  cover  the  whole  republic,  coast  and  interior,  from  the 
Uruguayan  border  clear  up  to  where  the  Amazon  begins  to  run  down 
off  the  Andes.  It  would  mean  about  six  months'  playing  the  principal 
towns,  and  after  that  the  man  could  take  the  thing  around  for  another 
half  year  to  the  smaller  places,  and  by  the  time  he  got  through  he'd 
know  Brazil  better  than  Edison  knows  electricity." 

"Mighty  interesting  proposition,"  I  remarked,  as  the  street-car  drew 
up  at  its  destination  beside  the  Largo  da  Carioca,  "and  I  hope  you 
find  the  man  you  need.  I  have  a  serious  problem  on  my  hands,  too, 
and  that  is  how  to  get  back  to  the  U.  S.  A.  early  enough  this  fall 
to  join  in  an  important  coon  hunt." 

For  I  did  not  for  a  moment  seriously  consider  the  offer  as  made 
to  me,  or  at  least  as  acceptable.  I  had  already  been  three  times  as 
long  in  South  America  as  I  had  expected  to  be  when  I  first  set  out 
to  explore  the  traces  of  the  old  Inca  highway  between  Quito  and  Cuzco. 
I  was  decidedly  "fed  up"  with  "Spigs"  and  all  their  ways;  too  long 
a  time  outside  the  United  States  atmosphere  is  not  good  for  the  mind 
one  wishes  to  keep  American,  just  as  too  long  a  time  in  the  tropics 
is  injurious  to  the  body  one  would  keep  robust.     Moreover,  never 


STRANDED  IN  RIO  251 

having  seriously  tested  it,  I  was  not  at  all  certain  I  had  the  charlatanism 
indispensable  to  any  success  in  the  realms  of  "practical  business" — 
and  there  was  still  a  possibility  that  I  might  get  aboard  something  or 
other  northward  bound. 

Next  day  I  took  to  pursuing  ships  and  skippers  with  renewed 
energy.  But  the  town  was  swarming  with  stranded  Americans  willing 
and  able  to  pay  any  sum  that  could  be  mentioned  in  one  breath  for 
the  privilege  of  sleeping  in  a  stokehole  of  anything  bound  for  the 
United  States.  That  afternoon  I  dropped  in  on  Linton  at  his  hotel 
and  entertained  him  with  a  hypothetical  question. 

"Suppose,"  I  said  in  my  most  casual  tone,  "suppose  such  a  man 
as  you  are  looking  for  would  sign  a  contract  for  only  six  months, 
that  he  wanted  his  salary  to  start  at  once,  instead  of  the  first  of 
September,  and  that  on  the  day  he  signed  he  would  need  an  advance 
of  about  five  hundred  thousand — er — reis  to  get  a  proper  movie- 
magnate  silk  hat  and  diamond  solitaire,  what  would  be  your  private 
remarks  when  you  reached  the  bathroom?" 

"If  he  had  your  experience  with  South  Americans,  for  instance," 
came  the  prompt  reply,  "I  'd  have  the  contract  ready  within  half  an 
hour." 

"Thanks  for  the  compliment,"  I  replied.  "I  just  wanted  to  know, 
from  a  sociological  point  of  view." 

Whereupon  I  set  out  once  more  and  went  over  all  the  steamship 
offices  and  captains'  favorite  bar-rooms  with  a  fine-toothed  comb, 
only  to  be  more  than  ever  convinced  that  my  native  land  had  lost  all 
desire  ever  to  see  me  again.  So,  late  that  evening,  having  ])aused  at 
the  edge  of  the  impassable  sea  to  shake  a  fist  at  the  northern  horizon, 
I  stopped  at  Linton's  hotel  to  sign  the  contract  he  had  just  drawn  up. 
By  its  terms  I  was  to  take  full  charge  of  the  tour  of  the  Kinetophone 
in  Brazil,  playing  the  entire  country,  except  the  states  south  of  Sao 
Paulo  that  I  had  already  seen,  ending  up  on  the  Amazon  six  months 
later,  and  receiving  my  first  month's  salary  at  once — as  soon  as  the 
banks  opened.  Early  next  morning  a  messenger  from  the  steamship- 
office  I  had  most  often  pestered  brought  me  word  that  if  I  would 
report  at  once  I  could  sign  on  a  ship  sailing  that  evening  for  Pensacola, 
Elorida ;  and  later  in  the  day  I  was  offered  a  chance  to  go  to  New 
Orleans  as  a  deck-hand.  But  then,  it  would  have  been  a  long  walk 
from  either  of  those  ports  to  the  place  I  called  home. 

During  the  remaining  half  of  August  I  did  little  but  spend  my 
first  month's  salary,  chiefly  among  the  tailors  of  Rio,  at  prices  which 


252  WORKING  NOI^TH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

made  the  advertisements  in  the  New  York  papers  look  enticing.  Lin- 
ton had  arranged  his  Buenos  Aires  business  to  run  on  without  him 
imtil  we  could  give  the  customary  special  performance  before  the 
president  of  the  republic.  This  he  hoped  would  be  within  a  week, 
but  he  had  reckoned  without  Brazilian  red  tape.  The  "outfit"  arrived 
the  day  after  I  signed  the  contract, — eight  large  pieces  of  what  looked 
like  the  baggage  of  a  barn-storming  company,  and  Wayne  Tuthill  of 
Long  Island  and  the  Edison  factory.  "Tut,"  as  it  was  natural  he 
should  be  quickly  dubbed,  was  a  tall,  handsome,  ingenuous  lad  of 
twenty-four,  of  that  clean-cut,  clean-minded  type  of  American  youth 
which  makes  the  libertine  jiiventud  of  South  America  stand  out  in  such 
striking  contrast.  He  had  never  before  been  outside  the  United  States 
— which  I  rated  an  asset — but  had  been  the  unhesitating  choice  of  the 
company  when  Linton  wired  for  their  best  practical  electrician  and 
operator  who  would  accept  a  year's  contract. 

On  the  following  day  I  bade  farewell  to  my  little  inside  room  in 
the  German  hotel  down  in  the  raw-coffee  scented  heart  of  Rio,  and 
moved  into  a  new  home  with  what  their  "want  ad"  in  the  Jornal  do 
BrasU  described  as  a  "family  of  all  respectability."  There  were 
hundreds  of  private  families  only  too  glad  to  patch  out  their  income 
by  taking  in  a  "serious  cavalheiro"  as  a  paying  guest.  My  new 
quarters  were  on  the  Praia  de  Botafogo,  in  the  district  out  beyond 
the  tiny  praga  and  statue  of  Jose  de  Alencar.  From  my  easy-chair 
I  could  look  out  across  the  bay  at  one  end  of  the  harbor  and,  though 
a  headland  cut  off  the  "Sugar  Loaf,"  I  had  a  splendid  view  of  all 
the  long,  fantastic  skyline  of  Rio,  now  silhouetted  against  the  sun- 
lighted  clouds,  now  standing  out  in  the  brilliant  sunshine  as  if  barely 
a  stone's  throw  away.  The  room  had  a  southern  exposure,  too,  which 
is  important  in  Rio,  especially  toward  the  end  of  August  with  summer 
coming  on.  True,  there  were  a  few  drawbacks.  I  had  to  take  board 
as  well  as  lodging,  though  I  was  by  no  means  sure  that  a  glimpse  into 
Brazilian  family  life  would  offset  the  heaviness  of  Brazilian  family 
food.  There  were  good  electric  lights,  but  no  carpets  or  rugs,  virtually 
unknown  in  Brazil,  and  not  a  suggestion  either  of  bookshelf  or  waste- 
basket,  while  the  table  was  a  tiny  thing  implying  that  at  rrost  the  occu- 
pant miglit  have  now  and  then  to  write  a  perfumed  lover's  note. 

Though  it  was  some  time  before  we  got  our  show  started,  or  even 
got  the  outfit  ashore,  we  were  a  busy  trio.  First  and  foremost  there 
was  the  Herculean  problem  of  getting  the  thing  through  the  customs. 
This  was  no  such  simple  matter  as  going  down  to  the  ugly  little  green 


STRANDED  IN  RIO  253 

Alfandega  building  on  the  water  front,  opening  the  boxes,  paying  our 
duty,  and  taking  them  away.  Things  are  not  done  in  that  breathless 
manner  in  Brazil.  Knowing  that  it  costs  more  to  get  a  moving- 
picture  film  into  Brazil  than  to  buy  it  in  Europe  or  the  United  States, 
we  were  prepared  to  be  held  up  by  the  mulatto  footpads  masquerading 
as  a  government,  if  only  they  would  have  it  over  with  at  once  and 
let  us  go  our  way  with  whatever  we  might  have  left.  What  we  needed 
first  of  all,  it  seemed,  was  a  despachante,  a  native  customs  broker, 
familiar  with  all  the  ins  and  outs  of  the  laws  on  import  duties — and 
an  expert  in  circumventing  them.  But  could  we  not  attend  to  this 
matter  ourselves,  seeing  there  were  three  of  us  in  the  prime  of 
life,  two  speaking  Spanish  and  one  more  or  less  Portuguese,  and  with 
nothing  else  whatever  to  do?  We  could  not.  We  must  have  the 
services  of  a  regular  despachante — just  why,  we  learned  all  in  due 
season.  The  broker,  however,  did  not  rob  us  of  occupation;  in  fact, 
we  were  still  permitted  to  do  almost  all  the  work.  We  spent  several 
hours  one  day  hunting  out  our  boxes  amid  an  orderless  jumble  of 
many  ship-loads  of  warehoused  merchandise  and  wrestling  them  out 
into  plain  sight.  The  rest  of  the  afternoon  we  wasted  in  coaxing 
the  swarm  of  supercilious  officials  who  lolled  about  the  place  to  examine 
them.  They  paid  us  not  the  slightest  attention,  until  our  despachante 
came  to  vouch  for  our  existence.  Then  one  of  them  "examined"  the 
eight  boxes  by  gingerly  lifting  half  of  the  wooden  cover  of  one  of 
them,  glancing  at  the  unopened  inner  tin  casing,  and  ordering  the 
covers  nailed  down  again.  This,  however,  was  only  a  preliminary 
formality,  and  while  our  broker  prepared  for  the  next  moves  in  their 
regular,  deliberate  order,  we  contained  ourselves  in  such  patience  as 
we  possessed. 

Meanwhile  we  learned  many  interesting  details  about  Brazilian 
customs  laws  and  those  who  enforce  them.  Portland  cement,  we 
found,  pays  duty  on  gross  weight.  More  than  half  the  barrels  of 
such  a  shipment  had  been  broken  in  transit,  or  by  the  wharf  stevedores 
who  landed  it,  and  all  vestige  of  cement  had  been  lost.  The  customs 
men  carefully  gathered  the  scattered  barrel-staves  together,  weighed 
them,  and  charged  the  assignee  duty  on  them  as  cement !  Regular 
merchants  in  Rio  have  a  despachante,  we  learned,  who  does  all  the 
customs  busmess  of  his  client  at  a  fixed  rate  of  twelve  milreis  a  box, 
large  or  small.  If  he  succeeds  in  avoiding  any  part  of  the  duty  due, 
the  merchant  pays  him  half  that  amount  as  a  reward.  Thus  there 
arrives  a  box  of  twenty  pairs  of  shoes,  on  which  the  duty  would  be 


254  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

sixty  dollars.  The  despachante  arranges  with  some  of  his  friends  in 
the  customhouse  to  let  the  box  in  for  twenty  dollars,  and  the  assignee 
pays  that  amount  in  duty  and  gives  the  broker,  in  addition  to  his 
customary  twelve  milreis,  one  half  of  the  forty  dollars  saved.  The 
Brazilians  have  no  word  for  bribery;  they  use  the  expression  comer 
(to  eat).  A  merchant  who  has  been  forced  to  pay  full  legal  duty 
on  a  bill  of  goods  asks  his  despachante  anxiously,  referring  to  the 
strict  new  customs  official  who  passed  on  it,  "Elle  jd  come?"  To 
which,  perhaps,  comes  the  sad  answer,  "Ndo,  ainda  nao  come"  (He 
doesn't  eat — yet).  A  few  weeks  later  the  merchant  sends  the  honest 
man  a  few  bottles  of  perfumery  or  some  equally  welcome  present. 
If  he  sends  them  back,  he  is  not  yet  "ripe."  But  at  length  word  goes 
round,  "Jd  come^'  (Now  he  eats),  and  the  merchants  whose  goods 
pass  through  his  hands  heave  a  sigh  of  relief. 

"When  your  shipment  arrives,"  a  foreigner  long  engaged  in  business 
in  Rio  explained,  "and  the  duty  is  large,  say  twenty  or  thirty  contos, 
you  go  to  the  customhouse  yourself  and  say  to  the  conferente,  'I  shall 
be  in  my  office  from  three  to  four  to-morrow.'     Then  you  go  away. 
The  conferente  is  the  official  examiner;  his  assistant,  who  opens  and 
closes  the  boxes  and  does  the  other  manual  labor,  is  called  his  "fiel" 
(faithful  one).     You  cannot  be  a  successful  merchant  in  Rio  without 
being  on  friendly  terms  with  your  conferente  and  his  "fiel."     When 
his  work  ends,  at  three,  he  drops  in  to  see  you  before  he  goes  home, 
and  the  matter  is  fixed  up  to  the  satisfaction  of  both  parties.     If  you 
try  to  fight  the  system  you  are  up  against  it.     Only  half  the  articles 
that  come  into  Brazil  are  on  the  tariff  schedule,  and  if  a  conferente 
has  it  in  for  you  he  will  decide  that  your  declaration  is  made  out 
wrong,  no  matter  how  you  make  it  out,  and  will  fine  you  for  trying 
to  flimflam  the  government — and  a  certain  percentage  of  all  fines  go 
to  the  man  who  discovers  the  'irregularity.'     Then  before  goods  leave 
the  customhouse   they   must  have   the   government   consumption-tax 
stamps  on  them,  and  there  is  another  fine  chance  to  'eat.'     The  man 
who  was  at  the  head  of  the  stamp-selling  down  there  for  thirty-two 
years  was  recently  retired  on  a  pension  and  written  up  in  the  papers 
as  'a  life-long  and  faithful  servant  of  the  Republic';  yet  ever  since 
I  have  lived  here  he  could  be  'fixed'  at  from  one  fourth  to  one  half  the 
legal  price  of  the  stamps.     The  young  fellow  who  now  has  his  job 
does  n't  'eat'  yet,  so  all  the  merchants  are  cursing  him,  and  his  fellow- 
officials  accuse  him  of  fazendo  fita — of   showing  off.     But  word   is 
going  round  now  that  he  is  beginning  to  'eat'." 


STRANDED  IX  RIO  255 

Beautiful  scenery  evidently  does  not  beautify  character.  The  dis- 
honest officials  cannot  plead  the  excuse  of  necessity,  for  their  legal 
income  is  high.  Inspectors  get  three  contos,  conferentes  eight  hundred 
to  a  thousand  milreis  a  month,  which  surely  is  generous  to  men  who 
work  only  from  eleven  to  three,  with  much  "tolerance"  as  to  absences 
during  that  time  and  at  least  sixty-five  legal  holidays  a  year.  "Tariff 
legislation,"  says  an  outspoken  Brazilian  publicist,  "more  than  any 
other  one  thing,  has  been  the  source  of  the  corruption  that  has  rotted 
public  service,  and  in  the  growth  of  the  sinister  privileges  fostered 
by  the  'protective'  system  there  is  almost  sole  responsibility  for  the 
widespread  perversion  of  ideals." 

It  took  a  full  week  to  get  our  outfit  through  the  customs,  and 
it  would  have  taken  longer  had  nature  not  gifted  me  with  an  im- 
patience capable  of  developing  into  profanity.  Both  our  dcspachante 
and  the  endless  gantlet  of  scornful  officials  which  our  case  was  forced 
to  run  were  firm  believers  in  the  efficacy  of  '"amanha" — which  is  our 
old  friend  "mafiana"  of  Spanish-America.  How  many  sheets  there 
were  of  laboriously  hand-written  documents,  signed  every  which  way 
by  scores  of  insuflferable  loafers  in  the  crowded  Alfandcga,  in  the 
intervals  between  smoking  cigarettes,  gossiping  with  friends,  scowling 
with  a  haughty  air  upon  whoever  dared  insist  on  attracting  their 
attention,  I  have  no  means  of  computing.  Typewriting  is  illegal  in 
government  business  in  Brazil,  as  in  most  of  Latin- America ;  too  many 
old  fogies  who  know  only  how  to  scratch  with  a  pen  would  have  to 
be  dispensed  with  to  make  way  for  such  an  innovation,  and  they  are 
the  backbone  of  political  parties.  In  the  end  Linton  had  to  depo>it 
$700,  which  it  was  solemnly  promised  would  be  returned  to  him  when 
the  outfit  was  taken  out  of  the  country.  Officially,  the  American 
dollar  is  worth  3$i20  in  Brazil.  I  immediately  reduced  the  $700  to 
milreis  at  that  rate,  and  Linton  prepared  to  pay  it.  But,  we  were 
informed,  the  government  accepts  its  own  money  only  at  4$  120  to  the 
dollar !  More  figuring  resulted  in  the  discovery  that  we  must  entrust 
the  Brazilian  government  with  nearly  three  contos.  Thirty-five  per 
cent,  of  this  deposit  must  be  in  gold.  I  began  to  compute  this  per- 
centage by  dividing  by  4$  120.  The  broker  smiled  at  me  as  at  an 
amusing  child.  When  the  milreis  is  figured  hack  in'.o  gold,  he 
explained,  the  dollar  must  be  taken  at  2$i20.  In  other  words,  a 
Brazilian  government  official  can  demonstrate  before  your  ver>-  eyes 
that  thirty-five  per  cent,  of  seven  hundred  dollars  is  $480! 

On  the  day  after  our  outfit  had  at  last  been  admitted  to  practice  in 


256  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Brazil,  and  the  dcspachante's  seemingly  exorbitant  demands  had  been 
satisfied,  one  of  us  happened  to  be  in  his  office  when  in  dropped  the 
bewhiskered  old  fossil  who  had  "examined"  our  stuff.  He  was  cheery 
and  gay  now,  all  dressed  up,  his  sour  and  haughty  official  manner 
wholly  gone,  and  he  greeted  everyone  in  the  office  like  old  and  esteemed 
friends.  After  the  first  embrace  or  two  he  and  the  despachante  sat 
down  on  opposite  sides  of  the  latter's  work  table,  their  hands  met 
once  under  it,  then  the  fossil  rose  and  went  away  with  a  satisfied 
smile  scattered  among  his  untrimmed  whiskers  and  a  hand  lingering 
affectionately  about  one  pocket. 

Our  next  task  was  to  hire  a  lawyer  to  get  the  trademark  "Kinetophone" 
registered  in  Brazil  in  the  name  of  the  Edison  Company.  This  matter 
is  of  prime  importance  to  anyone  introducing  a  new  invention  into 
the  land  of  "amanha."  It  is  not  that  the  Brazilians  are  so  inventive 
that  they  can  readily  imitate  new  contrivances ;  on  the  contrary,  their 
mechanical  genius  is  close  to  zero.  But  if  he  seldom  invents  or  initiates, 
the  "Brazie"  is  not  lazy  in  the  sense  of  complete  indolence.  He  has 
the  gambling  instinct  as  well  as  the  tropical  desire  to  get  through  life 
as  easily  as  possible,  and  laborious  trickery  seems  to  him  a  lesser 
effort  than  work.  Being  quick  to  appropriate  the  ideas  of  others,  he 
is  much  given  to  stealing  trademarks. 

To  tell  the  truth,  the  Argentine  is  worse  than  Brazil  in  this  respet*^ 
There  is  a  regular  band  of  rascals  in  Buenos  Aires  who  do  nothing 
but  steal  and  register  foreign  trademarks,  while  in  Rio  the  traffic  is 
at  least  unorganized.  The  laws  of  both  countries  give  the  first  person 
to  deposit  a  trademark  in  the  national  archives  the  sole  right  to  use  it. 
The  mark  may  have  belonged  for  half  a  century  to  an  American  or 
a  European  company;  it  suffices  for  some  argentino  or  Brazilian  to 
get  it  registered  in  his  own  name  to  prevent  the  legitimate  owner  from 
using  it  in  that  country  without  paying  the  thief  blackmail.  One  of 
this  gentry  reads  in  a  newspaper  or  a  catalogue  of  some  new  foreign 
invention  with  a  catchy  name,  rushes  to  register  it  as  his  own,  and  then 
lies  in  wait  for  the  real  owner.  Even  a  trademark  of  the  French 
government  tobacco  monopoly  was  stolen  by  an  argentino  and  France 
was  forced  to  pay  him  a  handsome  sum  to  get  it  back.  Upon  his 
arrival  in  Buenos  Aires,  Linton  had  found  the  Kinetophone  already 
registered.  But  as  the  native  whose  eye  had  been  attracted  by  the 
word  had  not  understood  what  it  represented,  he  had  registered  it 
as  the  name  of  a  lecheria,  or  milk-shop!  Nevertheless  Linton  was 
compelled  to  pay  him  several  hundred  pesos  for  the  privilege  of  using 


STRANDED  IN  RIO  257 

the  word  in  his  advertising  or  even  in  the  theater,  for  the  moment 
he  put  up  a  poster  or  ran  a  film  and  record  in  whicli  the  word  "kineto- 
phone"  appeared,  he  could  have  been  arrested  and  his  outfit  confiscated. 
It  costs  only  i20$ooo,  including  lawyer's  fees,  to  have  a  trademark 
registered  in  Brazil,  yet  Americans  have  been  blackmailed  out  of  as 
much  as  30,ooo$ooo  for  neglecting  to  do  so  in  time. 

It  turned  out  that  the  Kinetophone  had  been  overlooked  by  Brazilian 
tricksters,  but  we  had  to  wait  three  days  to  make  sure  of  this  before 
we  dared  publicly  use  the  name.  Meanwhile  we  had  visited  incognito 
the  fifty  cinemas  then  running  in  Rio,  with  a  view  to  classifying  them 
for  future  purposes;  we  had  offered  the  "A.  C.  M."  a  benefit  per- 
formance later  for  the  privilege  of  trying  out  our  apparatus  in  their 
hall,  and  had  set  out  in  trio  to  make  our  first  contract. 

The  chief  moving-picture  man  of  Brazil,  with  a  string  of  cinemas 
in  Rio  and  Sao  Paulo  and  connections  elsewhere,  was  a  Spanish  ex- 
bootblack.  Like  his  colleagues  and  rivals,  he  informed  us  that  it  was 
not  customary  in  Brazil  to  pay  a  fixed  sum  for  such  a  novelty  as  wc 
had  to  offer,  that  he  "never  risked  a  cent,"  but  that  he  would  be 
willing  to  talk  to  us  on  a  percentage  basis.  Then  we  found  that  the 
ex-bootblack  had  Missouri  blood  in  his  veins— perhaps  because  he 
had  once  driven  mules — and  that  he  would  not  believe  in  the  drawing 
powers  of  Edison's  new  invention  until  he  had  been  shown.  We  had 
no  misgivings  as  to  our  ability  to  show  him,  so  we  went  out  along 
the  Mangue  Canal,  with  its  mirrored  double  row  of  royal  palms  on 
either  bank,  and  rented  for  a  day  the  old  open-work  wooden  "Theatro 
Polytheama,"  where  we  gave  the  doubting  Thomases  of  the  "movie" 
world,  and  a  throng  of  newspaper  men  and  "influential  citizens,"  a 
convincing  private  exhibition. 

Next  day  we  signed  a  "fifty-fifty"  contract  with  the  ex-bootblack 
to  play  for  sixty  days  in  his  establishments  in  Rio,  Sao  Paulo  and 
vicinity.  By  that  time  it  was  already  September  7th,  the  first  of 
Brazil's  two  Independence  Days,  and  "Tut"  and  I  had  taken  up  our 
abode  on  the  Praia  do  Flamengo  in  the  district  called  Larangeiras, 
or  "Orange-trees."  It  was  nearer  town  than  my  former  room ;  more- 
over, while  I  am  duly  exhilarated  by  the  beauties  of  nature,  no  amount 
of  scenery  will  make  up  for  a  constant  diet  of  black  beans  and  dry 
rice,  surrounded  on  four  sides  by  a  constantly  caterwauling  Brazilian 
family  dressed  in  soiled  underwear  or  grease-spotted  kimonos.  As  a 
matter  of  fact  I  lost  nothing  even  of  scenery  by  the  change.  We  had 
a  marvelous  view  of  the  "Sugar  Loaf,"  of  all  the  great  bay  and  its 


258  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

islands,  of  Nictheroy  and  the  hazy  outline  of  farther  Brazil  beyond. 
With  out  feet  on  our  own  railing  we  could  see  the  steamers  that  might 
be  bringing  us  news  from  home  come  slipping  in  at  the  harbor's 
mouth,  or  watch  a  blood-red  sunset  on  the  cloud  billows  across  the 
bay.  We  w^ere  four  doors  from  the  President's  palace  of  Cattete, 
and  in  the  morning  we  could  stroll  across  the  Beira  Mar  in  our  bathing- 
suits  to  dive  off  the  president's  private  wharf  and  swim  out  to  the  little 
warship  he  always  kept  ready  for  the  day  when  motives  of  health 
should  force  him  to  leave  Brazil  in  a  hurry.  Men,  women  and  children, 
with  a  towel  over  their  shoulders,  were  familiar  morning  sights  all 
along  the  Beira  Mar — the  women,  of  course,  chiefly  of  foreign  origin, 
for  no  real  Brazilian  lady  wouM  ever  dream  of  bathing — at  least  in 
semi-public.  Swimming  was  allowed  along  Rio's  magnificent  drive- 
way until  nine  in  the  morning,  and  some  bathers  were  to  be  seen  now 
and  then  at  other  hours,  for,  as  the  resplendent  black  policeman  on 
our  corner  told  us,  while  he  watched  several  of  them  pass,  "Oh,  yes,  they 
do  bathe  after  nine,  but  it  is  against  the  law." 

Finally,  at  one  o'clock  on  the  afternoon  of  Monday,  the  fourteenth 
of  September,  we  gave  the  first  public  exhibition  in  Brazil  of  the 
Kinetophone — and  before  midnight  we  had  given  eleven  of  them.  We 
had  opened  in  the  "Cinema  Pathe"  on  the  Avenida  Central,  in  many 
ways  the  proudest  and  most  fashionable  motion-picture  house  not  only 
of  that  sumptuous  thoroughfare  but  of  all  Brazil;  but  our  debut  was 
not  attended  with  the  customary  formality.  For  a  week  Linton  had 
been  cooling  his  heels  in  the  anteroom  of  the  Cattete  Palace,  hoping 
to  have  the  honor — and  incidentally  the  prestige  and  publicity — of 
giving  the  president  of  the  republic  a  private  exhibition  before  dis- 
closing the  virtues  of  the  new  invention  to  the  general  public.  But 
those  were  busy  times  in  government  circles,  for,  in  addition  to  his 
manifold  political  troubles,  the  president  had  recently  acquired  an 
eighteen-year-old  wife,  so  that  at  length  we  were  forced  to  start 
without  his  blessing  and  the  customary  send-off  of  important  novelties 
in  Latin-American  countries.  By  this  time  the  World  War  was  on 
in  earnest  and  Brazil  was  loudly  complaining  of  "A  Crisc,"  or  hard 
times;  yet  when  our  first  day  at  the  "Cinema  Pathe"  was  ended,  we 
found  that  the  box-office  had  taken  in  considerably  more  than  three 
million — reis !  Even  in  real  money  that  was  better  than  a  thousand 
dollars. 

That  very  night  Linton  fled  to  Buenos  Aires,  leaving  behind  a 
document  making  me  the  "Brazilian  concessionary"   of  the  Kineto- 


STRANDED  IN  RIO  259 

phone,  and  the  weight  of  the  whole  enterprise  fell  abruptly  on  my 
shoulders.  My  first  duty  was  to  get  our  share  of  the  opening  day's 
receipts.  High  noon  having  been  agreed  upon  as  the  time  to  divide 
the  previous  day's  earnings,  I  called  at  that  hour  upon  the  general 
manager  for  Rio  of  the  "Companhia  Brazileira,"  to  get  our  half  of 
the  three  million  in  cash — Brazilian  cash,  unfortunately — and  carried 
it  to  the  British  bank.  That  was  a  daily  formality  thereafter,  for  while 
we  had  all  due  respect  for  the  Brazilian  and  his  business  methods,  we 
adopted  the  same  viewpoint  in  dealing  with  him  as  the  Scotchman  who, 
asked  for  a  recommendation  by  a  retiring  clerk,  wrote : 

"This  is  to  certify  that  Sandy  McCabe  has  worked  for  me  the  past 
twelve  years.  Regarding  his  honesty  I  can  say  nothing,  as  I  never 
trusted  him." 

The  Kinetophone  consists  of  a  series  of  films  projected  from  a 
booth  like  an  ordinary  motion-picture  film,  and  of  a  large  electrically 
operated  phonograph,  with  six-minute  records,  set  on  the  stage  or 
behind  the  screen  and  synchronized  with  the  film  by  means  of  tiny 
stout  black  cords  running  over  pulleys  attached  to  the  walls  or  the 
ceiling  of  the  intervening  room.  As  ours  could  not  be  thrown  from  the 
same  projecting  machine  as  the  voiceless  films,  the  usual  process  was 
to  set  up  our  special  apparatus  in  the  same  booth  with  the  other,  if 
there  was  room,  cutting  a  second  opening  in  the  front  of  this  ta 
"shoot  through;"  otherwise  we  required  a  special  booth  to  be  built 
for  us  alongside  the  regular  one.  Our  outfit  consisted  of  fifteen  films 
and  their  corresponding  phonograph  records.  First  of  all,  on  every 
program  was  an  explanation  of  the  new  invention  and  a  demonstra- 
tion of  its  power  to  reproduce  all  kinds  of  sounds,  a  film  specially 
made  to  order  in  Portuguese,  with  the  flag  of  Brazil,  the  president's 
picture,  and  other  patriotism-stirring  decorations  in  the  background. 
The  only  other  film  in  the  native  tongue  was  a  dialogue  called  the 
"Transformation  of  Faust,"  in  which  two  Portuguese  youths,  who  had 
somehow  been  enticed  out  to  the  Edison  factory,  ranted  for  six  minutes 
through  a  portion  of  Goethe's  masterpiece.  But  there  were  extracts 
from  five  popular  Italian  operas  and  three  Spanish  numbers,  all  of 
which  took  well  with  Brazilians,  and  though  the  remainder  w€re  in 
English,  they  were  musical  and  comical  enough  to  win  interest  irre- 
spective of  language. 

The  Kinetophone  requires  two  operators,  one  in  the  booth  and  the 
other  at  the  phonograph.  Thus  I  was  not  only  manager,  auditor  and 
"concessionary,"  but  obliged  to  run  the  stage  end  of  the  performance. 


26o  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Fortunately  we  did  not  furnish  the  entire  program,  our  part  of  the 
bill  consisting  of  the  "Portuguese  Lecture"  and  two  other  numbers, 
filling  one-third  of  the  hour  consituting  a  "section"  and  leaving  the 
rest  of  it  to  ordinary  films  or  whatever  form  of  entertamment  the 
local  manager  chose  to  supply.  Every  hour,  therefore,  from  one  in 
the  afternoon  to  eleven  at  night,  seven  days  a  week,  I  had  to  be  on 
hand  to  put  on  the  first  of  our  records,  jump  out  to  the  edge  of  the 
audience  and  signal  to  "Tut"  in  his  special  booth,  spring  back  again 
and  touch  off  the  phonograph  at  exactly  the  right  instant,  repeat  this 
with  the  other  two  records,  thrust  these  back  into  their  special  trunk, 
lock  it — and  spend  the  next  forty  minutes,  other  duties  willing,  as  I 
saw  fit.  Never  during  those  eleven  hours  a  day  did  I  dare  go  far  enough 
away  from  the  theater  to  get  a  real  let-up  from  responsibility.  The 
most  I  could  do  was  to  snatch  a  lunch  or  stroll  down  to  one  end  or 
the  other  of  the  Avenida,  to  see  the  ships  depart  or,  on  windy  days, 
to  watch  the  sea  pitching  over  the  seawall  of  the  Beira  Mar,  wetting 
even  the  autobusses — and  then  hurry  back  again  for  our  part  of  the 
next  "section." 

Besides  running  the  films,  "Tut"  had  to  rewind  them  after  each 
performance,  so  that  his  leisure  time  was  ten  mmutes  less  to  the 
"section"  than  mine.  I  soon  found  that  he  was  not  only  a  highly 
efficient  operator,  but  that  he  had  just  those  qualities  needed  to  make 
a  long  companionship  agreeable.  Honest  and  geimine  as  gold  coin 
in  war  time,  easy-going,  optimistic,  unexcitable,  wholly  ignorant  of  for- 
eign languages,  temperaments,  or  customs,  yet  pleasant  with  all  races 
and  conditions  of  men,  he  was  an  ideal  team-mate,  having  large  quan- 
tities of  that  patience  so  much  needed  in  tropical  and  Latin  lands,  and 
of  which  I  have  so  scanty  a  supply.  Thanks  to  "Tut,"  the  Brazilians 
got  better  Kinetophone  performances  than  most  Americans  have  heard. 
The  novelty  did  not  take  particularly  well  in  the  United  States,  though 
for  no  fault  of  its  inventor.  The  essential  and  all  important  thing 
with  the  Kinetophone  is  perfect  synchronization.  If  the  character  on 
the  screen  speaks  or  sings  exactly  as  he  opens  his  mouth,  the  illusion 
is  remarkable ;  let  there  be  the  slightest  mterval  between  the  sound  and 
the  lip  movements  and  the  thing  becomes  ludicrous.  When  the  inven- 
tion was  first  shown  in  the  United  States  there  was  perfect  synchroniza- 
tion, and  a  consequent  rush  of  orders  for  machines  and  operators. 
There  being  no  supply  of  the  latter  on  hand,  they  had  to  be  trained  in  a 
hurry.  Many  were  ill  prepared  for  their  duties,  with  the  result  that 
when  they  were  hurriedly  sent  out  on  the  road  they  frequently  gave 


STRANDED  IN  RIO  261 

distressing  performances.  Gradually,  therefore,  the  invention  was 
withdrawn,  with  the  promise  to  perfect  it  further  and  make  it  "fool 
proof,"  so  that  by  the  time  Linton  had  taken  the  concession  for 
Brazil,  "Tut,"  the  expert  who  had  trained  others,  was  available  and 
the  new  form  of  entertainment  made  a  much  bigger  "hit"  in  Brazil 
than  in  the  land  of  its  origin. 

I  had  only  one  serious  fault  to  find  with  "Tut,"  one  that  added 
materially  to  those  of  my  managerial  duties  which  had  to  do  with 
keeping  on  pleasant  terms  with  the  somewhat  sour  manager  of  the 
"Cinema  Pathe."  Less  fond  than  I  of  strolling  the  downtown  streets 
during  our  breathing  spells,  "Tut"  usually  spent  them  with  an  Ameri- 
can novel  or  magazine  in  the  unoccupied  second-story  anteroom  of  the 
theater.  There  the  "Pathe"  had  stored  its  extra  chairs,  and  from  them 
"Tut"  was  wont  to  choose  a  seat,  place  it  at  the  edge  of  the  stone 
balustrade  of  the  balcony,  where  he  could  look  down  upon  the  crowd 
surging  up  and  down  the  Avenida,  and  pass  his  time  in  reading.  But 
the  chairs,  as  is  usual  in  South  America,  were  of  the  frail  variety, 
and  "Tut,"  a  generous  six  feet  in  height  and  by  no  means  diaphanous 
in  weight,  had  the  customary  American  habit  of  propping  his  feet 
on  a  level  with  his  head — with  the  result  that  at  more  "or  less  regular 
intervals  "crash !"  would  go  a  chair.  On  the  day  when  the  manager, 
his  eyes  bloodshot  with  rage,  requested  me  to  visit  the  second-story 
anteroom  with  him,  during  "Tut's"  absence,  the  wrecks  of  eleven 
chairs  were  piled  in  one  corner  of  it.  After  that  I  never  had  the  audac- 
ity to  go  up  and  investigate,  but  crashing  sounds  were  still  heard  during 
the  half  hour  devoted  to  the  silent  films. 

The  "Companhia  Brazileira"  advertized  extensively,  and  the  Kineto- 
phone  was  well  patronized  from  the  start.  Brazilians  take  readily  to 
novelties,  especially  if  they  can  be  made  the  fashion,  and  our  audiences 
of  the  second  day  included  both  priests  and  "women  of  the  life," 
which  is  a  sure  sign  of  popular  success  in  Brazil.  As  our  doubled 
entrance  fee  of  two  milreis  was  high  for  those  times  of  depression, 
also  perhaps  because  the  "Cinema  Pathe"  was  considered  a  gathering 
place  of  the  elite,  we  entertained  only  the  well  dressed,  or,  perhaps 
I  should  say,  the  overdressed.  They  were  blase,  artificial  audiences, 
never  under  any  circumstances  applauding  or  giving  any  sign  of 
approval ;  they  always  gave  me  the  impression  of  saying,  "Oh,  rather 
interesting,  you  know,  as  a  novelty,  but  I  could  do  much  better  myself 
if  I  cared  to  take  the  time  from  my  love-making  and  risk  soiling  my 
spats  and  my  long,  slender,  do-nothing  fingers."    But  as  they  continued 


262  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

to  bring  us  as  our  share  of  the  receipts  more  than  a  conto  of  reis  a 
day,  it  was  evident  that  they  found  the  performance  pleasing. 

The  moving  picture  might  be  a  real  educating  influence  on  the  imag- 
inative and  emotional  Brazilians,  were  it  not  that  those  who  manipu- 
late this  business  see  fit  to  put  their  faith  in  an  intellectual  bilge-water 
which  gives  chiefly  false  notions  of  life  in  the  world  beyond  their 
horizon.  The  same  "Penny  Dreadfuls"  in  film,  concocted  of  saccharine 
sentimentality,  custard-pie  "comedy,"  and  a  goodly  seasoning  of  the 
criminal  and  the  pornographic,  that  add  to  the  weariness  of  life  else- 
where, are  the  rule  in  the  Brazilian  capital.  Here  even  the  elite, 
or  at  least  the  well-dressed,  flock  to  see  them.  This  is  partly  due  to 
the  lowly  state  of  the  legitimate  stage  in  Brazil  and  the  atrocious  per- 
formances given  by  nearly  all  the  "actors"  who  seek  their  fortunes 
in  South  America.  Though  some  Latin-American  playwrights,  and  a 
few  of  the  players,  have  done  things  worth  while,  the  stage  depends 
almost  entirely  upon  "talent"  imported  from  Europe,  entertainers  of 
Spanish  (or,  for  Brazil,  of  Portuguese)  origin,  with  the  crudest  no- 
tions of  histrionic  art,  or  superannuated  discards  from  the  French  or 
Italian  stage,  mixed  with  youthful  hopefuls  who  have  crossed  the 
Atlantic  to  try  it  on  the  dog.  These  misplaced  porters  and  chamber- 
maids, mere  lay  figures  dressed  to  represent  certain  characters,  romp 
about  the  stage  in  their  natural  roles,  their  eyes  wandering  in  quest  of 
friends  in  the  audience,  whom  they  give  semi-surreptitious  greetings 
and  seek  to  charm  by  "grandstand  plays,"  making  the  while  the  me- 
chanical motions  they  have  been  taught  and  automatically  repeating 
what  they  are  told  to  say  by  the  prompter.  It  is  strange  that  the  often 
artistic  Latin  races  will  endure  the  prompter,  instead  of  insisting  that 
actors  learn  their  parts.  It  is  a  rare  experience  to  find  a  place  in  the 
house  where  one  can  hear  the  play  and  not  hear  the  prompter  snarling 
the  lines  five  words  ahead,  so  that  any  semi-intelligent  person  in  the 
audience  could  repeat  them  after  him  more  effectually  than  do  most 
of  the  louts  behind  the  footlights.  As  is  the  case  with  literature,  the 
theater  in  South  America  is  mainly  designed  to  appeal  to  the  male. 
Respectable  women  are  rarely  seen  at  the  average  playhouse,  not 
merely  avoiding  the  "casino"  with  its  "specially  imported  blond  artistes" 
of  not  too  adamantine  morals,  but  even  what  corresponds  to  our  vaude- 
ville, where  the  audience  sits  smoking  with  its  hat  on  and  the  boxes 
are  graced  by  demimondaines.  In  fact,  the  stage  and  respectability 
have  no  connecting  link  in  the  Latin-American  mind.  All  over  South 
America,  and  especially  in  Brazil,  "actress"  is  synonymous  with  less 


STRANDED  IN  RIO  ^3 

complimentary  terms  ;  nor  is  it  possible  to  convince  a  Brazilian  that  such 
is  not  universally  the  case  elsewhere.  Rarely  anything  better  than 
stupid  and  salacious  appeals  to  men,  it  is  small  wonder  that  the  living 
drama  has  been  nearly  ousted  from  South  America  by  the  cinema,  with 
its   easily   transportable,   international    form   of   entertainment. 

The  motion-picture  having  come  after  all  the  business  part  of  Rio 
was  built,  there  was  no  room  to  erect  "movie  palaces"  which  have  else- 
where followed  in  the  train  of  Edison's  most  prostituted  invention. 
All  the  cinemas  along  the  Avenida  Central  are  former  shops,  without 
much  space  except  in  depth,  and  as  the  temperature  quickly  rises  when 
such  a  place  is  crowded,  the  screen  often  consists  of  a  curtain  acro?s 
what  used  to  be  the  wide-open  shop  door,  so  that  one  on  the  sidewalk 
may  peep  in  and  see  the  audience  and  even  the  orchestra,  though  he 
can  see  nothing  of  the  projected  pictures  within  an  inch  of  his  nose. 
Alongside  the  "movie"  house  proper  another  ex-shop  of  similar 
size  is  generally  used  as  a  waiting-room.  Here  are  luxurious  uphols- 
tered seats,  much  better  than  those  facing  the  screen,  and  some  such 
extraordinary  attraction  as  a  "feminine  orchestra  specially  contracted  in 
Europe."  For  the  waiting-room  is  of  great  importance  in  Rio.  It 
takes  the  place  in  a  way  of  a  central  plaza  and  promenade  where 
the  two  sexes  can  come  and  admire  one  another,  and  it  is  often 
thronged  immediately  after  the  closing  of  the  door  to  the  theater 
proper,  by  people  who  know  quite  well  they  must  sit  there  a  full 
hour  before  the  "section"  ends.  In  fact,  young  fops  sometimes  come 
in  and  remain  an  hour  or  two  ogling  the  feminine  charms  in  the 
waiting-room  and  then  go  out  again  without  so  much  as  having  glanced 
at  the  show  inside.  In  contrast,  many  cinemas  have  "second-class" 
entrances,  without  waiting-room  and  with  seats  uncomfortably  near  the 
screen,  where  the  sockless  and  collarless  are  admitted  at  reduced 
prices. 

It  does  not  require  long  contact  with  them  to  discover  that  Latin 
films  are  best  for  Latins,  for  both  audience  and  actors  have  a  mutual 
language  of  gestures  and  facial  expressions.  The  lack  of  this  makes 
American  films  seem  slow,  labored,  and  stupid,  not  only  to  Latins, 
but  to  the  American  who  has  been  living  for  some  time  among  them. 
It  is  a  strange  paradox  that  the  most  doing  people  on  the  earth  are 
the  slowest  in  telling  a  story  in  pantomime  or  on  the  screen.  Wliat  a 
French  or  an  Italian  actress  will  convey  in  full,  sharply  and  clearly,  by  a 
shrug  of  her  shoulders  or  a  flip  of  her  hand,  the  most  advertised 
American  "movie  star"  will  get  across  much  more  crudely  and  indis- 


264  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

tinctly  only  by  spending  two  or  three  minutes  of  pantomimic  labor, 
assisted  by  two  or  three  long  "titles."  The  war  quickly  forced  the 
"Companhia  Brazileira,"  as  it  did  most  of  its  rivals,  to  use  American 
films ;  but  neither  impresarios  nor  their  clients  had  anything  but 
harsh  words  for  the  "awkward  stupidity"  and  the  pretended  Puritanic 
point  of  view  of  those  makeshift  programs — with  one  exception,  Bra- 
zilian audiences  would  sit  up  all  night  watching  our  "wild  west"  films 
in  which  there  was  rough  riding.  Curious  little  differences  in  customs 
and  point  of  view  come  to  light  in  watching  an  American  film  through 
South  American  eyes.  For  instance,  there  is  probably  not  a  motion- 
picture  director  in  the  United  States  who  knows  that  to  permit  a  sup- 
posedly refined  character  in  a  film  to  lick  a  postage  stamp  is  to  destroy 
all  illusion  in  a  Latin-American  audience.  Down  there  not  even  the 
lowest  of  the  educated  class  ever  dreams  of  sealing  or  stamping  a 
letter  in  that  fashion.  An  American  film  depicting  the  misadventures  of 
a  "dude"  or  "sissy"  was  entirely  lost  upon  the  Brazilian  audiences, 
because  to  them  the  hero  was  exactly  their  idea  of  what  a  man  should 
be,  and  they  plainly  rated  him  the  most  "cultured"  American  they  had 
ever  met.  Bit  by  bit  one  discovers  scores  of  such  slight  and  insignifi- 
cant differences,  which  sum  up  to  great  differences  and  become  another 
stone  in  that  stout  barrier  between  the  Latin  and  the  Anglo-Saxon 
divisions  of  the  western  hemisphere. 

On  Thursday  came  the  customary  mid-weekly  change  of  bill,  and 
we  were  thankful  for  a  new  program  after  hearing  the  old  one  more 
than  thirty  times.  Also  the  "music,"  which  the  cinema  orchestra  ground 
out  incessantly  during  every  moment  when  we  were  not  giving  our 
part  of  the  show,  changed,  though  hardly  for  the  better.  We  were  a 
godsend  to  the  musicians  of  that  orchestra,  especially  to  the  player  of 
the  bass-viol.  Hitherto  they  had  been  required  to  play  unbrokenly 
from  one  in  the  afternoon  until  nearly  midnight ;  our  advent  gave  them 
ten  or  eleven  twenty-minute  respites  during  that  time.  This  they 
usually  spent  lolling  around  the  room  behind  the  screen,  about  the 
phonograph  and  our  trunks,  where  they  frequently  fell  asleep.  Particu- 
larly the  anemic  quadroon  who  manipulated  the  largest  stringed  instru- 
ment seemed  never  to  catch  up  on  his  sleep.  Barely  did  our  part  of 
the  program  begin  than  he  stretched  out  in  such  comfort  as  he  could 
find  in  the  improvised  green-room  and  went  soundly  to  sleep,  so 
soundly  that  no  noise  under  heaven  could  wake  him — save  one.  When 
it  came  time  for  them  to  return,  his  companions  would  shout  at  him, 
jostle  him,  sometimes  even  yank  him  erect;  nothing  had  the  slightest 


STRANDED  IN  RIO  265 

effect  on  his  somnolence.  But  the  instant  the  first  strains  of  their 
never-varying  "music"  were  heard  in  the  orchestra  pit  outside,  the 
sleeper  would  awake  with  a  flash,  make  one  spring  through  the  door, 
and  be  automatically  scraping  off  his  part  with  the  others  by  the  time 
they  had  reached  the  second  or  third  note. 

Sunday  is  the  big  theater  or  "movie"  day  in  Brazil,  for  then  the 
families  of  the  "four  hundred"  turn  out  in  full  force.  On  our  seventh 
day  they  were  standing  knee-deep  in  the  waiting-room  most  of  the 
afternoon  and  early  evening.  The  congestion  increased  that  part  of 
my  duties  which  had  to  do  with  auditing,  for  the  head  of  a  family 
often  paused  to  shake  hands  effusively  with  the  door-keeper,  after 
which  the  entire  family  poured  boldly  in,  and  it  became  my  business  to 
find  out  whether  there  had  been  anything  concealed  in  the  effusive 
hand,  and  if  not,  why  the  box-office  had  been  so  cavalierly  slighted. 

One  afternoon  the  Senhor  Presidente  da  Republica  came  to  honor 
the  fourth  performance  of  the  day  with  his  patronage,  and  to  give  us 
the  official  blessing  without  which  we  had  been  forced  to  open.  A 
corps  of  policemen  was  sent  first  to  hang  about  the  door  for  nearly 
two  hours — giving  passers-by  the  impression  that  the  place  had  been 
"pinched."  There  followed  a  throng  of  generals,  admirals,  and  unad- 
mirables  in  full  uniform,  who  waited  in  line  for  "His  Excellency." 
The  president  came  at  length  in  an  open  carriage,  his  girl  wife  beside 
him,  two  haughty  personalities  in  gold  lace  opposite  them,  and  a  com- 
pany of  lancers  on  horseback  trotting  along  the  Avenida  beside  them. 
The  waiting  line  fawned  upon  the  leathery-skinned  chief  of  state, 
bowed  over  the  hand  of  his  wife,  then  the  whole  throng  surrounded  the 
loving  pair  and,  pushing  the  humble  door-keeper  scornfully  aside, 
swarmed  into  the  cinema  without  a  suggestion  of  offering  to  pay  the 
entrance  fee.  Luckily  the  doors  were  not  high  enough  to  admit  the 
lancers,  who  trotted  away  with  the  red  of  their  uniforms  gleaming  in 
the  afternoon  sunshine.  It  was  my  first  experience  with  the  official 
"deadheads"  of  Brazil,  but  by  no  means  my  last. 

We  quickly  found,  too,  that  the  official  gathering  was  bad  for  busi- 
ness. Surely  any  American  theater  holding  510  persons  would  fill 
up  when  the  President  of  the  Republic  and  his  suite  were  gracing  it 
with  their  presence !  Yet  here  there  was  only  a  scattering  of  paying 
audience  as  long  as  the  "deadheads"  remained,  which,  thanks  perhaps 
to  a  film  showing  them  in  the  recent  Independence  Day  parade,  was  un- 
til they  had  heard  the  entire  program  once  and  the  Kinetophone  twice. 
The  president,  it  seemed,  was  hated  not  only  for  his  political  iniquities. 


266  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

but  the  elite  looked  down  upon  him  for  marrying  a  girl  little  more 
than  one-fourth  liis  own  age  and  letting  her  make  the  national  presi- 
dency the  background  for  her  social  climbing ;  and  to  enter  the  theater 
while  the  president  and  his  retainers  were  there  was  to  risk  losing 
both  one's  political  and  social  standing  as  a  high  class  Brazilian. 

It  soon  got  on  our  nerves  to  know  that  we  were  the  only  persons, 
alive  or  dead,  in  the  whole  expanse  of  Brazil  who  could  operate  the 
Kinetophone,  that  if  anything  happened  to  either  of  us  it  meant  a  ruined 
performance,  our  income  cut  off,  and  an  unamused  Rio  elite.  Let 
one  of  us  fail  to  be  on  the  dot  ten  times  a  day  and  the  thing  would 
have  been  ruined,  for  the  Carioca  is  nothing  if  not  critical  and  of  so 
little  patience  that,  had  we  missed  a  single  performance,  word  would 
have  gone  out  at  once  that  the  "novelty"  at  the  "Cinema  Pathe"  had 
failed.  I  decided,  therefore,  during  our  second  week  to  get  and  break 
in  a  native  assistant,  and  next  morning  the  two  principal  daihes  con- 
tained this  appealing  announcement: 

Preciza-se  de  um  operador  de  cinema, 
jovem,  sent  familia,  com  ao  menos  dots 
annos  de  expericncia,  sabendo  bem  a 
electricidade  e  algo   de  ingles. 

I  intended  to  be  particularly  insistent  on  those  points  of  youth, 
"without  family,"  and  "something  of  English,"  but  I  soon  found  that 
we  would  be  lucky  even  to  get  the  other  and  indispensable  requirements 
of  cinema  experience  and  a  knowledge  of  electricity.  In  Buenos 
Aires  mobs  had  besieged  Linton's  hotel  in  answer  to  a  similar  an- 
nouncement; in  New  York  it  would  probably  have  brought  out  the 
police  reserves.  Yet  hardly  half  a  dozen  applicants  turned  up  at  the 
Praia  do  Flamengo  after  our  morning  swim,  languidly  to  inquire  our 
desires.  The  first  was  a  stupid  looking  negro  who  did  not  seem  to  fulfill 
^ny  of  the  requirements;  the  second  was  a  shifty-eyed  mulatto  with 
.no  physique — badly  needed  for  the  one-night  stands  ahead;  the  third 
was  quite  visibly  impossible.  I  engaged  the  fourth  man  to  appear. 
Carlos  Oliva  was  about  "Tut's"  age,  which  did  not  hinder  him  from 
already  having  a  wife  and  four  children.  But  then,  so  do  all  BraziHans. 
legitimately  or  otherwise.  He  was  a  Paulista,  that  is,  born  in  Sao  Paulo, 
though  of  Italian  parents,  a  practiced  mechanic  and  experienced  opera- 
tor of  ordinary  "movie"  films,  and  he  looked  intelligent.  To  be  sure  he 
6poke  no  English,  but  that  vain  hope  had  died  early  and  it  became 
evident  that  "Tut"  would  have  to  learn  enough  Portuguese  to  get  along 
\R'hen  it  came  time  for  me  to  go  ahead  of  the  show  to  make  bookings. 


STRANDED  IN  RIO  267 

I  had  gradually  been  acquiring  a  better  command  of  that  tongue 
myself,  and  now  made  use  of  it  to  draw  up  a  formidable  contract  tying 
Carlos  hand  and  foot.  Though  I  was  forced  to  pay  him  the  equivalent 
of  a  hundred  dollars  a  month  and  traveling  expenses,  I  required  him 
to  stay  with  the  Kinetophone  until  the  tour  of  Brazil  was  completed, 
not  to  exceed  one  year.  On  every  "second  feast  day"  after  the  first 
month  he  was  to  get  four-fifths  of  his  pay,  the  rest  to  remain  in  the 
hands  of  the  "Linton  South  American  Company"  until  the  tour  was 
finished,  when  the  balance  was  to  be  paid  him  in  a  lump  sum,  together 
with  his  fare  back  to  Rio.  If  he  left  before  that  time,  both  the  balance 
and  the  transportation  were  forfeited,  for  we  did  not  propose  to  spend 
weeks  training  a  man  only  to  have  him  leave  us  at  the  first  whim  or 
better  offer — though  the  latter  contingency  was  not  likely.  Lastly,  he 
was  not  to  engage  in  any  other  occupation  while  with  us,  he  could  be 
discharged  upon  a  week's  notice  if  he  proved  unsatisfactory,  with  bal- 
ance and  fare  paid,  and  he  was  required  never  to  show  or  explain  to 
others  the  workings  of  the  Kinetophone,  nor  disclose  knowledge  of 
anything  connected  with  our  company  which  he  might  learn  directly 
or  indirectly.  With  all  these  clauses  duly  included  and  the  document 
signed  in  duplicate,  I  fancied  even  a  Brazilian  could  find  no  means 
of  leaving  us  in  the  lurch.  Little  had  I  suspected,  when  I  was  tramping 
the  streets  of  Rio  six  weeks  before,  carrying  all  my  worldly  possessions 
wrapped  in  a  square  yard  of  cloth,  that  I  should  soon  be  strutting 
down  the  Avenida  Central  as  one  of  her  captains  of  industry,  laying 
down  the  law  to  mere  mortals,  and  shouldering  my  way  daily  through 
her  narrow  downtown  streets  to  deposit  a  large  sum  of  money. 

About  the  time  Carlos  joined  us  I  found  myself  in  new  and  wholly 
unexpected  trouble — silver  trouble.  It  scarcely  seems  possible  that 
anyone  could  protest  at  getting  too  much  silver,  but  many  strange  things 
happen  in  Brazil.  There  is  no  Brazilian  gold,  except  in  theory;  and 
its  paper  does  not  suffice  for  small  transactions.  One  day  the  Rio 
manager  of  the  "Companhia  Brazileira"  met  me  at  our  usual  noonday 
conference  with  the  announcement  that  he  would  have  to  pay  me  a 
part  of  our  percentage  in  silver.  I  saw  no  reason  why  he  should  not, 
other  than  the  trouble  of  carrying  it  a  few  blocks  to  the  bank,  and 
accepted  200$ooo  in  paper-wrapped  rolls.  But  when  I  dropped  these 
down  before  the  receiver's  window,  he  declined  to  accept  them.  I 
fancied  the  tropical  heat  had  suddenly  affected  his  sanity,  and  went 
in  to  see  one  of  the  English  "clarks."  From  him  I  learned  that  it  was 
only  too  true;  the  banks  of  Rio  do  not  accept  silver!     I  had  heard  of 


2(38  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

South  American  bankers  doing  all  kinds  of  tricks,  but  I  had  never 
before  known  one  to  refuse  money.  I  tried  several  other  banks  of 
various  nationalities  with  the  same  result;  they  all  accepted  only 
silver  enough  to  make  up  odd  multiples  of  ten  milreis.  The  English 
manager  of  the  British  bank,  who  had  lived  so  long  in  Brazil  that  he 
had  lost  some  of  the  incommunicativeness  of  his  race,  took  the  trouble 
to  explain  the  enigma  to  me.  The  year  before,  the  agent  of  a  German 
firm  had  arranged  with  certain  Brazilian  officials  to  issue  a  new 
coinage  and  the  firm  had  flooded  the  country,  about  the  capital,  with 
shining  new  silver  500,  1000,  and  2000  reis  pieces.  But  silver  is  legal 
tender  in  Brazil  only  up  to  two  milreis;  therefore,  when  it  suddenly 
became  plentiful,  the  banks  could  not  accept  any  great  amount  of  it 
because  they  had  no  outlet  and  would  have  had  to  build  new  vaults 
to  hold  the  stuff.  At  the  cinema  door  we  naturally  took  in  much 
prata,  so  that  even  after  making  change  a  donkey-load  of  it  remained 
to  be  divided  each  noonday.  I  could  not  buy  drafts  with  it  on  New 
York ;  the  government  would  not  receive  it — nor  its  own  paper  money 
in  most  transactions,  for  that  matter;  being  "made  in  Germany"  it 
was  hardly  worth  melting  up.  The  one  rift  in  the  silver  clouds  was 
that  merchants  were  so  anxious  for  trade  during  this  period  of  depres- 
sion that  they  would  accept  any  kind  of  money  in  any  amount  if  only 
people  would  buy.  We  paid  Carlos  in  silver  and  we  spent  silver 
ourselves  whenever  we  had  to  spend.  What  we  could  not  get  rid  of  in 
that  way  I  could  only  sell  at  a  four  per  cent,  loss,  and  as  I  was  already 
paying  5$ooo  a  dollar  for  drafts,  I  finally  took  to  dropping  pounds  of 
silver  into  our  trunks. 

But  the  worst  was  still  to  come.  Commerce  was  suddenly  swamped 
under  a  flood  of  nickel!  Its  "refunding  loan"  having  failed,  Brazil 
was  hard  put  to  it  to  find  money  for  current  expenses,  and  disgorged 
anything  that  could  be  found  lying  about  the  federal  treasury.  If  the 
government  refused  to  take  its  own  silver  and  nickel,  it  did  not  by 
any  means  refuse  to  pay  it  out.  The  lower  and  less  influential  officials 
were  paid,  when  at  all,  in  rolls  of  silver,  those  without  any  political 
pull  whatever  in  nickel,  and  there  were  cases  of  being  paid  in  vintems, 
the  obsolete  copper  coins  of  twenty  reis  each  which  may  be  seen  in 
use  only  among  beggars  and  negro  street  hawkers.  On  government 
pay-days,  ever  more  rare  now  as  time  went  on,  one  might  see  a  govern- 
ment bookkeeper  or  a  school  teacher  come  in  to  buy  a  long-needed  bar 
of  soap  and  a  flashy  new  shirt,  lugging  in  both  hands,  like  dumbbells, 
great  lumps  of  paper-wrapped  silver,  nickel,  and  even  copper. 


STRANDED  IN  RIO  269 

It  was  not  until  September  25  that  I  could  risk  letting  Carlos  run  the 
stage  end  of  the  show,  even  under  my  immediate  supervision,  but  he 
learned  with  reasonable  speed  and  three  days  later  I  spent  the  after- 
noon climbing  Tijuca  and  turned  up  at  the  cinema  after  eight,  much 
relieved  to  find  that  nothing  had  gone  awry.  "Tut,"  however,  was 
forced  to  stick  close  to  his  booth  during  all  performances  as  long  as  we 
remained  in  Rio. 

Then  came  the  end  of  the  month,  the  figuring  up  of  accounts,  and 
the  startling  discovery  that  I  was  a  millionaire!  In  a  single  week  I 
had  earned  more  than  I  had  spent  since  entering  Brazil  three  months 
before,  and  my  salary  and  commission  for  the  month,  little  more  than 
half  of  which  we  had  been  playing,  summed  up  to  1,250,000  reis !  What 
it  would  have  been  under  normal  conditions,  when  Brazilians  were  able 
to  maintain  to  the  full  their  reputation  as  "good  spenders,"  only 
the  mathematically  minded  can  compute.  Now  that  I  had  my  first 
million,  by  all  the  rules  of  Wall  Street  I  should  have  had  no  difi'iculty 
in  rapidly  joining  the  multimillionaire  class.  However,  when  I  found 
that  at  the  prevailing  rate  of  exchange  my  earnings  amounted  to  barely 
tliree  hundred  dollars,  and  when  I  added  the  knowledge  that  a  five-cent 
handkerchief  sold  for  i$500,  that  it  cost  600  reis  to  have  a  collar  badly 
laundered,  and  that  rather  a  thin  letter  mailed  to  the  United  States  re- 
quired the  equivalent  of  twenty-five  cents  in  stamps,  I  realized  that  I  was 
in  no  immediate  danger  of  descending  into  the  pitiable  class  of  the  idle 
rich. 


CHAPTER  XII 

A   SHOWMAN    IN    BRAZIL 

SUMMER  was  beginning  to  seethe  in  earnest  when,  early  on  the 
first  morning  of  October,  I  sped  from  the  Praia  do  Flamengo 
to  the  miserable  old  station  of  the  Central  Railway  of  Brazil. 
Having  a  suitcase  now  and  lacking  time  to  wait  for  the  second-class 
trailer  in  which  persons  so  plebeian  as  to  carry  baggage  may  ride,  the 
trip  by  taxi  cost  me — I  mean  Linton — 9$6oo  instead  of  400  reis !  Nor 
was  that  the  only  shock  I  got  at  the  station.  On  my  journey  northward 
from  Uruguay,  with  my  worldly  possessions  in  a  bundle  under  one  arm, 
the  fact  that  the  railroads  of  Brazil  have  no  free  baggage  allowance  had 
scarcely  caught  my  attention.  But  now  I  was  responsible  for  an  outfit 
consisting  of  half  a  dozen  large  trunks  and  an  enormous  phonograph 
horn  in  its  special  case,  totaling  about  a  thousand  pounds.  Hence  the 
seriousness  of  the  discovery  that  for  the  single  day's  trip  from  Rio  to 
Sao  Paulo  personal  baggage  paid  256  reis  a  kilogram  and  all  other 
kinds  400!  No  wonder  Brazilians  drag  into  the  trains  with  them  all 
manner  of  strange  and  awkward  bundles,  for  though  any  portable 
amount  of  hand-luggage  is  transported  free  of  charge  in  the  passenger- 
cars,  everything  else  must  pay  almost  its  weight  in  human  flesh.  In 
fact,  a  fat  man  can  travel  more  cheaply  on  Brazilian  railways  than 
can  his  equally  heavy  trunk. 

There  are  private,  state,  and  federal  railways  in  Brazil,  and  the 
"Estrada  de  Ferro  Central"  belongs  to  the  last  category,  being  operated 
by  the  national  government.  I  had  already  seen  public  ownership  of 
railroads  working — or  failing  to  work — in  Chile,  however,  and  was 
therefore  not  so  surprised  at  some  of  the  manifestations  of  the  system  as 
a  complete  stranger  might  have  been.  One  quickly  learned  that  govern- 
ment railways  are  operated  primarily  for  the  convenience  of  trainmen 
and  government  officials,  and  that  the  public  is  privileged  to  fight  for 
any  space  that  may  be  left  after  these  have  been  accommodated.  Our 
cars  were  as  sadly  down  at  heel  as  any  I  had  seen  since  leaving  Chile, 
yet  in  the  station  from  which  we  departed  stood  an  official  train  of  the 
"Administragao  e  Inspecgao"  that  was  the  last  word  in  transportable 

270 


A  SHOWMAN  IN  BRAZIL  271 

sumptuousness,  its  sides  almost  wholly  of  plateglass  and  its  interior 
fitted  with  every  luxury.  In  this,  and  others  like  it,  government  railway 
managers  and  higher  officials  not  only  flit  about  at  will  but  carry  a 
host  of  political  friends  and  their  relatives  dov/n  to  the  fourteenth 
cousinship.  The  "Central"  shows  a  firm  belief,  too,  in  the  modern 
trade-union  principle  of  never  letting  one  man  do  what  four  men 
might  pretend  to  be  doing,  so  that  not  only  do  useless  higher  officials 
swarm  but  the  actual  railroad  men  are  little  less  numerous  than  the 
passengers. 

Notwithstanding  my  rule  never  to  go  over  the  same  ground  twice 
when  it  can  possibly  be  avoided,  I  was  returning  to  Sao  Paulo  because 
our  contract  with  the  "Companhia  Brazileira"  specified  that  we  present 
the  Kinetophone  there  during  the  month  of  October.    The  night  train 
would  have  been  more  comfortable  and  a  bit  swifter,  but  I  had  never 
been  overland  between  Brazil's  two  largest  cities ;  besides,  I  wished  to 
have  things  prepared  for  our  estrea  when  "Tut"  and  Carlos  arrived 
next  morning.     The  day  train  covers  the  310  miles  in  twelve  hours — 
at  least  on  the  time-rable.    For  the  first  of  them  it  was  but  one  of  a 
constant  procession  of  trains  in  both  directions,  not  only  the  "Central" 
but  the  private-owned  and  contrastingly  efficient  "Leopoldina"  railway 
maintaining  incessant  service  to  the  suburl)s.    Then  we  took  to  climbing 
from  the  coast  to  the  great  interior  plateau,  more  or  less  following  a 
small  river  sprawling  over  rocks  and  boulders,  passing  many  tunnels 
that  brought  out  the   incompetence   of  the   train  gas-lamps,   a   low- 
wooded  valley  sinking  below  us  as  we  rose  ever  higher.     Once  out  of 
this  and  above  the  coastlands,  we  turned  southwest  across  an  almost 
flat  plain.    By  no  means  covered  with  the  jungle  of  the  imagination,  it 
was  dry  and  bushy,  sometimes  wholly  bare,  occasionally  somewhat 
grass-grown.    Reddish  trails  along  which  wandered  mules  and  donkeys, 
and  now  and  then  one  of  the  humped  sacred  bulls  of  India  between  the 
thills  of  a  heavy  cart,  climbed  away  across  sr.ru^^-covered,  mist-toticihed 
foothills  or  low  ridges  here  and  there  punctuated  with  decapitated 
palm  trees.    The  soft  coal  that  Brazil  imports  for  her  railroads  abetted 
the  dustiness  of  the  season  in  making  the  trip  uncomfortable.    Beyond 
Cruzeiro,  already  in  the  state  of  Sao  Paulo,  huge  dome-shaped  ant- 
hills of  hard,  reddish  earth  began  to  litter  the  brownish  landscape.    The 
low  hills  had  been  ruthlessly  despoiled  of  their  natural  adornment  by 
the  systematic  incendiarism  of  man,  who  for  long  stretches  had  made 
his  destruction  of  the  primeval  forest  absolute.     It  struck  a  note  of 
sadness,  this  devastation  of  the  beauties  of  nature  for  utilitarian  pur- 


272  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

poses,  without  even  the  excuse  of  necessity,  since  the  forest  had  been 
destroyed  merely  to  save  the  trouble  of  cultivating  more  intensively  and 
by  more  modern  methods  lands  that  had  become  weary  from  overwork 
and  lack  of  fertilizing  nourishment — and  because  of  the  native  super- 
stition that  soil  which  does  not  produce  forest  will  not  grow  anything 
else.    Long  lack  of  rain  had  left  the  whole  country  powder-dry  and 
water-longing ;  even  the  palm-trees  drooped  as  if  tired  and  thirsty.    In 
folds  of  the  earth  clumps  of  bedraggled  banana  plants,  sometimes  with 
a  few  choked  cofiFee  bushes  beneath  them,  called  attention  to  primitive 
huts  before  which  a  black  colonist,  squatting  aimlessly  on  the  ground, 
and  his  numerous  brood  offered  to  the  sun's  caresses  skins  which  it 
cannot  tan.     It  is  a  nonchalant  life  at  best  where  the  earth  gives  a 
maximum  of  return  for  a  minimum  of  exertion.     Here  and  there  a  bit 
of  late  spring  plowing  was  going  on,  giving  the  ground  a  suggestion  of 
the  same  nudity  as  the  happy-go-lucky  inhabitants.     Now  and  then, 
from  the  summit  of  a  ridge,  we  caught  sight  of  an  old  plantation  house 
with  a  long  series  of  walls  behind  which  only  a  generation  ago  were 
herded  troops  of  negro  slaves,  and  about  it  vast  coffee-fields  abandoned 
for  want  of  labor.    Everywhere  was  an  air  of  do-nothing  poverty  and 
ruination,  coupled  with  a  fatalistic  surrender  to  circumstances.     The 
unimportant  towns  along  the  way,  little  less  thirsty  and  weary  of  life, 
seemed  to  be  inhabited  only  by  non-producers,  ranging  from  priests  to 
shopkeepers.     At  length  the  thick  dust-and-heat  haze  of  day  turned 
purple  with  evening,  a  heavy  sun  went  down  somewhere  to  the  west, 
leaving  a  great  red  blotch  irregularly  radiating  on  the  horizon,  the 
night  grew  almost  cold  and,  two  hours  behind  time,  we  rumbled  into 
the  glass-domed  Luz  station. 

Sao  Paulo  was  not  what  I  had  left  it  ten  weeks  before.  Not  only 
had  the  drought  made  it  dry  and  dusty  and  even  more  hazy  than  Rio, 
but  the  war  had  brought  its  industry  almost  to  a  standstill.  Swarms 
of  workmen  without  work  competed  with  hungry  boys  for  the  chance 
to  sell  a  few  newspapers.  In  the  poorer  section  a  serious  epidemic  of 
typhoid  had  broken  out ;  the  hotels  that  had  seemed  numerous  before, 
now,  with  only  a  guest  or  two  each,  appeared  trebly  so ;  "actresses"  who, 
had  always  had  a  native  "friend"  to  help  out,  had  taken  to  suicide 
because  even  the  aniigo  could  no  longer  pay  their  rent.  The  very 
cafes  concertos  in  which  rich  faacndeiros  from  the  coffee-growing 
interior  had  been  wont  to  squander  fortunes  on  blond  charmers  from 
across  the  sea  were  succumbing  one  by  one  to  the  "brutal  crisis." 
Everywhere  the  city  had  a  sad  air  and  many  of  those  one  met  were  too 


A  SHOWMAN  IN  BRAZIL  2-]^ 

£3(1  to  speak ;  even  the  weather  was  gloomy,  in  the  face  of  approaching 
summer.  The  sun  was  rarely  seen;  palm-trees  shivered  in  a  cold 
wind ;  disheveled  banana  plants  huddled  together  as  if  for  mutual 
warmth.  Professionally  the  "industrial  capital"  looked  unpromising 
indeed.  The  Paulista  had  not  yet  come  to  realize  that  the  war  was 
really  the  opportunity  for  a  land  with  such  vast  resources,  so  far  barely 
touched  by  commercial  enterprise,  to  shake  off  borrowing  and  indolence 
and  become  one  of  the  wealthy  and  powerful  nations  of  the  earth. 

Approached  from  the  federal  capital,  Sao  Paulo  showed  at  a  glance 
the  effect  on  the  human  race  of  even  a  slight  difference  in  climate. 
Though  not  appreciably  farther  from  the  equator  than  Rio,  and  barely 
half  a  mile  above  sea-level,  its  atmosphere  was  wholly  different.  The 
negro  element  is  conspicuously  less  and  seems  to  be  decreasing,  so 
that  a  century  hence,  Sao  Paulo  will  have  perhaps  no  more  of  the 
African  strain  than  the  Portuguese  have  now.  The  average  citizen  one 
saw  in  the  business  streets,  or  in  the  palatial  homes  of  coffee  kings 
and  captains  of  industry — not  to  mention  successful  politicians — out 
along  the  Avenida  Paulista  and  in  other  flowery  and  fashionable  sub- 
urbs had  much  less  in  common  with  the  motley  Carioca  than  with  the 
people  of  southwestern  Europe. 

"Tut"  and  Carlos  arrived  at  dawn  with  the  outfit.  I  had  been  dis- 
gruntled, though  not  greatly  surprised,  to  find  that  our  coming  had 
not  been  advertised,  except  with  a  small  portrait  of  Edison  in  some  of 
the  newspapers,  the  ex-bootblack  being  a  true  Latin-American  in  never 
believing  a  promise  until  it  has  been  fulfilled.  This  was  contrary  to 
our  contract  and  it  would  have  caused  us  to  lose  not  one,  but  several 
days  had  I  not  obliged  the  distrustful  Spaniard  to  let  us  open  at  one 
of  his  theaters  the  following  night  and  to  plunge  at  once  into  adver- 
tising, which  I  aided  by  a  special  performance  to  the  press  and  "influ- 
ential citizens"  at  six  that  afternoon.  As  we  were  booked  for  a  month 
in  the  city,  "Tut"  and  I  took  quarters — the  scarcity  of  transients  having 
brought  them  within  our  means — in  a  palace  overlooking  the  stately 
and  dignified  Municipal  Theater,  from  which  we  could  look  down 
upon  the  band-concerts  in  the  gardens  below  as  from  a  balcony — 
unless  they  coincided  with  our  own  performances.  Carlos,  being 
in  his  home  town,  joined  his  increasing  family  in  one  of  the  sections 
chiefly  devoted  to  workmen  of  Italian  antecedents. 

The  "Companhia  Brazileira"  operated  eight  cinemas  throughout  the 
city,  and  these  were  in  the  habit  of  changing  their  programs  nightly, 
instead  of  twice  a  week.    As  we  were  to  play  in  all  of  them,  I  set  to 


274  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

work  to  shift  our  numbers  in  such  a  way  as  to  give  us  more  than 
twenty-five  combinations  of  program  with  our  fifteen  films,  both  in 
the  hope  that  those  who  might  already  have  heard  one  number  would 
be  attracted  by  the  other  two  and  because  Brazilians  will  not  stand 
for  sopa  rcquentada  (reheated  soup),  as  they  call  a  repetition  of 
program.  Our  work  in  Sao  Paulo  was  quite  different  from  that  in 
Rio.  Here  the  cinemas  ran  only  two,  or  at  most  three,  sessions, 
totalling  less  than  four  hours  a  night,  with  matinees  only  on  Sundays. 
One  man  could  easily  have  done  all  that  the  three  of  us  were  called 
upon  to  do  in  those  days,  had  he  been  able  to  split  himself  into  triplets 
at  the  critical  moments.  Nor  was  our  income  cut  down  as  much 
as  the  difference  between  two  or  three  and  ten  performances  a  day 
would  suggest,  for  the  theaters  were  large,  with  boxes,  balconies  and 
galleries,  and  the  public  was  accustomed  to  take  its  entertainment  in 
common  at  reasonable  hours.  Theatrically,  however,  the  Paulistas 
were  quite  like  the  Cariocas.  Their  favorite  in  the  "movies"  was  a 
Parisian  comedian  whose  specialty  is  the  fall-into-a-coal-bin-in-even- 
ing-dress  brand  of  humor,  and  it  was  difficult  to  unseat  this  king.  To 
be  sure,  Sao  Paulo  audiences  did  show  a  few  more  signs  of  life 
than  those  in  the  national  capital,  an  occasional  snigger  at  least ;  but  on 
the  other  hand,  unlike  Rio,  with  its  pose  for  the  exotic,  they  somewhat 
resented  that  our  records  were  not  all  in  the  native  tongue.  "Tut" 
suggested  that   we   take  them  out  and  have  them  translated. 

Though  the  "Companhia  Brazileira"  was  required  by  the  terms  of 
our  contract  to  do  all  advertising,  I  decided  to  try  my  own  hand  at 
flim-flamming  the  public.  The  usual  posters,  newspaper  notices,  and 
banners  were  all  very  well,  but  I  wanted  something  special,  something 
unusual,  that  could  not  fail  to  impress  upon  everyone  that  "the  Kineto- 
phone,  the  wonderful  talking-moving  pictures,  the  marvel  of  the  age," 
and  so  on,  was  in  Sao  Paulo  for  a  very  limited  time  indeed,  "so  trez 
dias  (only  three  days)" — after  which  it  would  move  to  another  theater 
a  few  blocks  away.  Our  enterprising  partners  were  not  so  conservative 
in  advertising  as  they  were  lacking  in  new  ideas.  But  though  they 
were  always  harping  on  the  American  genius  for  publicity  and  insist- 
ing on  their  eagerness  to  be  shown,  they  invariably  backed  water  when 
any  unfamiliar  scheme  was  physically  laid  before  them,  and  this  dread 
of  the  unusual  was  so  often  in  evidence  during  our  tour  of  Brazil 
that  it  is  evidently  a  typical  Brazilian  characteristic.  In  Sao  Paulo 
I  hired  an  Italian  dwarf,  who  had  been  hanging  about  appealing  for  a 
job,  to  parade  the  streets  as  a  sandwich-man.    That  particular  form. 


A  SHOWMAN  IN  BRAZIL  275 

of  advertising  apparently  had  never  been  seen  in  Brazil.  The  company 
liighly  approved  of  the  scheme  in  outline,  but  refused  to  sponsor  an 
unprecedented  innovation  when  the  time  came  actually  to  carry  it  out. 
I  determined,  therefore,  to  risk  a  few  dollars  of  Linton's  money. 
Taking  two  of  our  large  cloth-mounted  portraits  of  Edison  as  a  back- 
ground, I  had  special  sandwich-boards  made  on  a  design  of  my  own — 
except  that  the  painter,  frightened  at  any  suggestion  of  novelty,  reduced 
my  idea  to  the  commonplace,  and  then  told  another  man  to  complete 
the  job.  This  he  did  eventually,  under  my  stern  supervision,  and  I 
turned  the  innovation  loose  on  Sao  Paulo.  An  hour  later,  I  met  my 
dwarf  carrying  the  two  boards  above  his  head  in  the  form  of  a  banner 
that  had  been  the  "last  cry"  in  Brazilian  advertising  for  at  least  a 
decade!  He  had  some  maudlin  excuse  to  offer  for  not  carrying  out 
my  orders  and  next  day  he  left  even  the  banner  loafing  on  a  corner 
while  he  worked  at  a  better  job  during  the  best  hours  of  Saturday, 
leaving  me  no  choice  but  to  turn  him  back  into  the  ranks  of  the  dis- 
gruntled unemployed.  Thanks  to  rain,  the  war,  and  other  drawbacks, 
we  did  so  poor  a  business  on  several  nights  that  the  ex-bootblack  talked 
of  breaking  the  contract,  for  though  they  expect  "um  inglez"  to  live 
strictly  up  to  his  side  of  an  agreement,  on  their  side  a  contract  means 
nothing  whatever  to  these  people.  To  make  things  worse  the  milreis 
dropped  again  to  five  to  the  dollar,  yet  money  was  so  scarce  that  we 
dared  not  raise  our  admission  price.  By  moving  every  three  days  to 
a  new  theater,  however,  we  got  fair-sized  audiences  and  did  moderately 
well,  though  nothing  like  what  we  should  have  done  before  the  war. 
All  my  other  troubles  as  a  theatrical  potentate,  however,  were  nothing 
compared  to  my  struggle  against  "deadheads."  Though  our  contract 
called  for  "complete  suppression  of  the  free  list  during  this  engage- 
ment," the  carrying  out  of  that  clause  was  quite  another  matter.  Ex- 
cuses for  entering  a  theater  in  Brazil  without  paying  an  admission  fee 
are  without  number.  One  might  suppose  that  a  Justice  of  the  Supreme 
Court  would  be  ashamed  to  use  his  office  to  force  his  way  into  a 
"movie"  house,  admittance  to  which  cost  barely  the  equivalent  of  a 
quarter.  But  many  men  of  that  class  not  only  usurped  free  admission, 
but  usually  took  their  entire  families  with  them — and  the  average 
Brazilian  family  can  fill  many  seats.  It  is  the  custom  in  Brazil  for 
theaters  to  send  annual  passes  to  all  higher  politicians.  Thus  the 
judge  is  given  a  richly  engraved  yearly  pass,  which  claims  to  be  non- 
transferable and  for  his  personal  use  only.  But  he  cannot,  of  course, 
be  expected  actually  to  show  it,  like  a  popular,  or  a  common  fellow. 


'276  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

or  to  have  his  right  questioned  to  bring  with  him  such  guests  as  he  may 
choose.  It  is  the  business  of  everyone  connected  with  the  theater  to 
know  the  judge  and  not  put  him  to  the  annoyance  and  degradation 
of  showing  that  pass,  which  would  be  an  insult  comparable  almost  to 
dunning  him  for  a  debt.  So  he  thrusts  the  obsequious  gateman  haught- 
ily aside  and  marches  in  with  his  whole  progeny — and  a  little  later  a 
barefoot  negro  boy  appears  with  an  elaborately  engraved  annual  pass 
which  states  that  he  is  a  Justice  of  the  Supreme  Court,  and  he  must 
be  let  in  without  question,  lest  one  have  to  answer  next  day  to  contempt 
of  court! 

We  were  incessantly  pestered  by  official  mendicants  and  well-to-do 
beggars,  by  friends  of  the  management  or  of  the  cinema  employees, 
by  "influential  people"  in  droves.  Favor  to  a  friend,  a  relative,  an 
acquaintance,  the  friend  of  a  friend's  friend,  to  anyone  with  an  authori- 
tative manner,  and  the  lack  of  moral  courage  that  goes  with  it,  is  the 
curse  of  all  Brazilian  door-keepers.  If  a  man  had  ever  met  a  person 
in  any  way  connected  with  the  institution,  he  expected  to  get  the  glad 
hand  and  a  smiling  invitation  to  "go  right  in."  It  was  not  so  much 
that  they  were  trying  to  save  money ;  the  milreis  admission  fee  was 
not  serious  to  the  official  and  influential  class ;  it  was  fazcndo  fita, 
showing  off  by  stalking  past  the  cringing  ticket-collector  with  an  air  of 
daring  him  to  challenge  them.  To  march  in  with  his  whole  decorated, 
upholstered,  and  perfumed  family  gave  a  man  the  sense  of  being  a 
person  of  superior  clay,  for  whom  there  are  no  barriers.  This  attitude 
ran  the  full  gamut  of  government  officials.  One  of  the  standing  privi- 
leges of  a  newly  appointed  Minister  of  War  is  to  go  to  the  theater  and 
ignore  the  ticket  collector ;  it  is  his  visible  and  final  proof  of  office. 
Negro  youths  employed  in  the  customhouse  forced  their  way  in  with- 
out protest  because  some  form  of  trouble  would  be  sure  to  follow  any 
interference  with  that  class.  My  ears  were  constantly  being  impor- 
tuned with,  "Please,  senhor,  may  I  go  in?  I  am  an  'artist'  or  a  poet, 
or  fourteenth  cousin  of  the  delcgado,  or  great-grandmother  of  the 
tov/n  dog-catcher,  or  a  bag  of  wind,  or  .  .  ."  When  mail  arrived 
for  me  at  our  consulate  the  native  clerk  was  careful  to  keep 
that  fact  to  himself  if  I  called  during  the  day,  so  that  he  could  bring 
it  to  me  at  night  and  use  it  as  a  ticket  for  himself  and  his  female 
hanger-on.  In  addition  to  all  this,  the  short-sighted  managers  think  it 
necessary  to  give  permanent  passes  to  many  of  the  "influential  families" 
in  their  neighborhood  so  that  others  will  see  that  the  place  is  fashionable 
and  will  patronize  it.     As  a  result,  those  who  have  money  do  not 


A  SHOWMAN  IN  BRAZIL  277 

need  to  spend  it,  because  they  have  season  tickets,  and  those  whom 
they  are  expected  to  imbue  with  the  desire  to  go  cannot  do  so  because 
they  do  not  have  the  money. 

A  woman  of  the  comfortable  class  comes  to  the  cinema  with  two,  or 
even  three  nearly  full-grown  children,  and  though  she  knows  perfectly 
well  that  they  are  expected  to  pay  at  least  half-fare,  she  presents  a 
single  ticket  for  herself  and  starts  to  drag  the  children  in  after  her. 
If  the  doorkeeper  has  the  courage  to  halt  her,  the  woman,  feigning 
great  indignation,  says : 

"Why  do  they  pay  admission,  little  bits  of  children  like  that?" 

"Yes,  senhora,"  replies  the  bowing  manager,  with  far  more  courtesy 
than  firmness. 

"Oh  dear,"  sighs  the  woman,  "I  have  just  ten  tostoes  with  me  for 
my  own  ticket  and  I'll  have  to  go  way  back  home  and  get  the  rest" — 
whereupon  the  manager  hastens  to  say,  "that's  perfectly  all  right, 
senhora,  go  right  in,"  for  he  knows  that  if  she  turns  homeward  it 
will  be  in  wrath  and  he  will  lose  even  the  "dc::  tostoes^'  she  has  paid 
for  her  own  ticket.  As  often  as  she  comes  to  the  cinema  the  woman, 
and  many  like  her,  works  the  same  trick  with  a  most  serious  and  inno- 
cent face. 

We  had  to  admit  free  the  chauffeurs  of  private  automobiles  in 
order  to  keep  the  friendship  and  family  influence  of  the  patrons  who 
came  in  them.  Sometimes  it  was  evident  that  the  cinema  was  making 
use  of  us  during  our  short  engagement  to  win  friends  for  themselves 
during  the  rest  of  the  season.  One  manager  went  so  far  as  to  try 
not  to  include  us  in  the  program  at  all  one  Sunday  afternoon,  knowing 
he  would  fill  the  house  anyway  with  Edison's  portrait  outside  and  not 
have  to  share  the  receipts  with  us.  Then  anyone  in  any  way  connected 
with  a  newspaper,  from  the  office-boy  down  to  the  editor's  third  mistress, 
must  be  let  in  without  question  or  the  entertainment  is  forever  blasted 
in  that  community.  A  decent  and  unusually  good  show  for  Brazil 
opened  near  us  one  evening.  Being  newly  arrived  from  Europe,  the 
manager  gave  two  seats  each  to  the  principal  newspapers,  instead  of 
allowing  anyone  attached  to  them  to  get  in  merely  by  mumbling  that 
fact  as  they  passed  the  door-keeper.  Next  day,  after  highly  praising  a 
salacious  and  worthless  thing  at  another  theater,  the  papers  one  and 
all  announced  that  no  decent  Brazilian  families  should  be  seen  at  this 
one,  and  the  following  night  the  police  closed  the  performance. 

At  the  "Cinema  High  Life" — the  mulatto  boy  operators  had  chalked 
the  name  on  the  back  brick  wall  of  the  stage  so  that  they  could  remem- 


278  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

ber  how  to  pronounce  it,  "Ai  Laife,"  in  three  syllables — which  prided 
itself  on  attracting  "le  monde  chic"  of  Sao  Paulo,  I  counted  215 
"deadheads"  one  night  out  of  an  audience  of  barely  six  hundred,  and 
I  missed  a  number  when  duties  took  me  away  from  the  door.  More- 
over I  did  not  count  the  score  or  more  in  uniform,  nor  the  friends  of 
the  stagehands  who  saw  the  pictures  from  the  rear. 

I  soon  cut  off  some  of  this  dead-heading,  but  it  was  at  the  expense  of 
much  diligence  and  audacity,  not  to  say  diplomacy,  for  one  cannot 
manhandle  the  Brazilians  as  one  can  a  more  straightforward  people, 
without  running  the  risk  of  being  boycotted  by  the  entire  community. 
It  meant  constant  vigilance,  too,  for  the  crooked  are  notoriously 
more  energetic  and  cunning  than  the  honest.  In  the  beginning  I  lost 
considerable  sleep  over  this  petty  form  of  grafting,  but  one  soon  learns 
in  Brazil  to  take  a  new  view  of  life,  to  smile  and  be  "sympathico"  and 
fit  in  as  well  as  possible  with  the  society  about  him.  It  is  the  only 
society  he  will  find  in  any  appreciable  quantity  as  long  as  he  remains 
in  the  country,  and  he  may  as  well  make  the  best  of  it. 

Once  in  a  while,  though  by  no  means  often  enough  to  make  up  for 
the  "deadhead"  losses,  men  went  to  the  other  extreme  in  fasendo 
fita.  A  fop  now  and  then  came  in  alone  and  bought  an  entire  box 
for  himself ;  or  men  well  known  in  the  community  might  come  the 
first  night  with  their  families,  thrusting  the  door-keeper  aside,  and  take 
seats  in  the  parquet,  while  the  next  night,  when  he  came  with  his  be- 
jewelled mistress,  the  same  man  would  take  the  best  box  available,  and 
pay  for  it,  less  out  of  a  sense  of  fairness  than  in  order  advantageously 
to  display  his  prize  to  his  envious  fellow-citizens. 

However,  in  compensation  for  my  troubles  new  honors  were  heaped 
upon  me.  The  Brazilian  dearly  loves  an  honorary  title,  and  being 
unable  to  think  of  any  other  that  would  fit  a  man  of  my  undoubtedly 
important  position  as  "concessionary"  for  all  Brazil  of  a  great  inven- 
tion, they  took  to  calling  me  "doctor."  In  time  I  grew  accustomed  to 
being  introduced  with  deep  bows  and  the  words,  "Permita-me  presen- 
tal-lhe  o  Doutor  Frawnck."  In  "movie"  circles  I  let  the  error  pass  as 
unimportant,  but  when  one  day  even  the  American  president  of  the 
college  of  Sao  Paulo  publicly  addressed  me  by  that  title,  I  protested. 

"But  you  have  a  bachelor's  degree,  have  n't  you  ?"  he  asked,  in  some 
surprise. 

"Yes,  I  believe  so,  if  I  haven't  lost  it  somewhere  along  the  road, 
but " 


A  SHOWMAN  IN  BRAZIL  279 

"Then  you  are  a  doctor  in  Brazil,"  he  replied,  "for  the  bachelor's 
degree  carries  with  it  that  title  in  this  country." 

"Dr."  Franck  I  remained,  therefore,  as  long  as  I  continued  to  man- 
age the  Kinetophone. 

With  matinees  only  on  Sundays,  I  found  plenty  of  time  for  my 
favorite  sport  of  tramping  the  countryside.  One  afternoon  I  strolled 
at  random  out  beyond  the  low,  dry,  i  eddish  cliffs  at  the  edge  of  town 
and  struck  off  in  the  direction  of  Sao  Caetano.  Gre-^.t  banks  of  white 
clouds  lay  piled  into  the  sky  on  all  sides,  and  the  dead-dry,  almost 
burning  stretch  of  rolling  country  was  half-hidden  under  a  haze  of 
red  dust.  I  passed  several  suburban  beer-halls,  each  with  its  "Giocce 
di  Bocce,"  or  Italian  nine-pin  earth  court  behind  it,  and  wandered  on 
along  more  red  roads,  the  light-colored  houses  scattered  over  the 
rolling  country  showing  up  in  front  and  disappearing  behind  me  in 
the  thick,  dust-laden  atmosphere  as  in  a  fog.  Gradually  I  came  to 
realize  that  almost  a  procession  of  men,  women  and  children  was 
bound  in  the  same  direction,  some  tramping  the  dusty  road  on  weary, 
blistered  feet,  others  lolling  at  their  ease  in  carriages  and  automobiles. 
Not  a  few  of  the  latter  were  expensive  private  cars  with  chauffeurs 
in  livery. 

For  nearly  an  hour  I  followed  the  same  direction.  Then  all  at  once, 
topping  a  slight  ridge,  I  came  upon  all  the  concourse  that  had  gone 
before — automobiles,  carriages,  and  pedestrians — gathered  in  a  broad 
bare  space  on  the  brow  of  a  treeless,  thirsty  hill.  Down  below  the 
throng  was  a  small  tile-roofed  hut  with  two  bar  fences  so  arranged 
before  it  that  only  one  person  at  a  time  of  the  crowd  that  was  jammed 
up  against  it  could  enter  and  bend  over  a  sort  of  counter  across  the 
open  door  to  talk  with  a  man  inside.  Each  ended  the  interview  by 
handing  the  man  a  ten,  or  more,  milreis  note  and  passed  out  through  a 
gap  between  fence  and  hut.  Though  the  entire  assortment  of  Brazilian 
complexions  was  to  be  found  in  the  throng,  many  were  full  whites, 
blond  European  immigrants  as  well  as  women  in  silks  and  diamonds, 
dandies  in  gloves,  spats  and  canes — and  every  mother's  son  and  daugh- 
ter of  them  talked  with  bated  breath  while  they  waited  their  turn  to 
approach  the  counter.  When  this  came,  the  men  reverently  raised 
their  hats,  the  women  gave  a  species  of  curtsey  and  in  many  cases 
kissed  the  man's  hand,  then  conversed  with  him  for  two  or  three  min- 
utes in  an  undertone,  which  could  not  but  have  been  heard  by  those 
crowded  nearest  to  the  speaker.  Then  they  paid  the  fee  and  passed 
on,  with  as  contrite  and  sanctified  a  look  on  their  faces  as  if  they  had 


28o  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

just  ended  a  private  conference  with  St.  Peter.  Each  carried  away  a 
mammoth  visiting  card  bearing  the  name  Vicente  Rodriguez  Viera, 
and  at  the  exit  a  shaggy  countryman  halted  each  by  thrusting  forth 
photographs  of  the  man  behind  the  counter,  which  each  hastened  to 
buy  with  a  meek  and  grateful  countenance,  as  if  by  divine  command. 

Inside  the  hut  was  an  electric  push-button  which,  like  the  back  door, 
connected  with  a  rambling  lot  of  fascnda  buildings,  and  near  at  hand 
was  a  large  liquor  emporium  and  two  restaurants  of  a  crude,  frontier- 
like variety.  I  was  preparing  to  sample  the  attractions  of  the  latter 
when  the  man  behind  the  counter  suddenly  rose  and  strolled  toward 
the  farmhouse  in  the  rear,  leaving  the  perspiring  crowd — automobiles, 
diamonds  and  all — to  await  his  sweet  will  about  returning.  He  was  a 
big  bulk  of  a  countryman,  plainly  a  caboclo,  or  copper-colored  native 
Brazilian  of  considerable  Indian  and  probably  some  negro  blood,  with 
a  great  bushy  black  beard.  Dressed  in  an  uncreased,  broad-brimmf  i 
felt  hat,  a  heavy,  dark  suit,  and  black  riding-boots,  he  wore  also  A 
colored  handkerchief  knotted  loosely  about  his  neck,  a  conspicuous 
watch-chain  and  charm  across  his  slightly  prominent  abdomen,  and 
huge  brass  rings  on  seven  of  his  fingers  considerably  enhancing  his 
general  air  of  cheap  vulgarity.  His  face  was  puffy  under  the  eyes 
and  had  a  "foxy"  expression  that  no  one  of  a  modicum  of  experience 
with  the  human  race  could  have  mistaken  for  anything  than  what  it 
was, — proof  of  cunning  rascality. 

As  the  fellow  was  returning  to  the  hut  I  approached  the  vendor  of 
photographs  and  asked  who  the  man  was.  His  ally  gave  me  a  look 
of  mingled  astonishment  and  disgust  for  my  ignorance  and  explained 
that  the  noble  being  was  a  curandciro,  or  a  "curer." 

"You  mean  a  physician?"  I  suggested. 

"No,  senhor,  not  a  doctor;  a  curandeiro." 

"Does  he  give  medicine?" 

"None  whatever." 

"Does  he  cure  by  laying  on  hands?" 

"Not  at  all.  He  merely  gives  them  his  card  and  they  buy  his  picture. 
After  nine  days  they  come  back  again,  and  three  times  in  the  next 
month,  and  then  once  or  twice  a  month,  if  they  are  still  ailing,  until 
they  are  cured.  He  is  a  caboclo  legilimo"  (a  dyed-in-the-wool  Bra- 
zilian) "and  has  been  here  eight  years." 

The  "curer"  was  taking  in  money  at  a  rate  that  should  have  allowed 
him  to  retire  in  much  less  time  than  that,  but  no  doubt  pride  in  his 
work  kept  him  at  it.     Formerly  he  had  operated  in  Sao  Paulo  itself, 


A  SHOWMAN  IN  BRAZIL  281 

but  had  been  banished  outside  the  city  limits.  An  elaborate  enameled 
sign  announced  that  on  Sundays  and  holidays  he  gave  no  cures,  "no 
matter  what  the  provocation."  As  he  reentered  the  hut,  the  whole 
throng  uncovered  or  curtseyed.  A  peculiar  fact  was  that  a  large 
number  of  his  clients  seemed  to  be  in  the  most  robust  of  health;  no 
doubt  in  these  cases  his  cures  were  most  effective.  Several  well- 
dressed  little  girls  were  forced  in  to  consult  him,  plainly  against  their 
wills  and  better  judgment,  for  they  laughed  at  the  silly  fraud,  and  one 
of  them  shocked  the  sanctimonious  crowd  by  calling  him  "velho 
barbudo"  (old  bewhiskered).  There  is  a  Brazilian  saying  that  "E 
mais  facil  enganar  a  humanidade  que  desenganal-a,"  which  might  be 
freely  translated,  "It  is  easier  to  squeeze  the  human  head  into  an 
uncouth  shape  than  to  squeeze  it  back  again  to  normals" 

We  found  that  the  Kinetophone  appealed  less  and  less  as  we  de- 
scended the  scale  of  wealth  and  education.  In  the  workingman's  dis- 
trict of  Barra  Funda,  to  which  we  went  after  a  week  down  in  Santos, 
we  were  escorted  by  mobs  of  urchins  until  we  felt  like  a  country 
circus,  but  there  was  little  gain  in  playing  to  such  audiences.  In  the 
slang  of  Brazil,  "brass  was  lacking,"  and  we  gave  matinees  to  scat- 
terings of  "deadheads"  and  half-price  children  and  evening  per- 
formances to  thin,  apathetic  houses.  The  young  toughs  we  would  not 
let  in  free  took  revenge  by  mutilating  our  cloth-mounted  posters,  the 
managers  lost  our  newspaper  cuts,  and  nearly  half  our  slight  share  of 
the  receipts  was  paid  in  nickel !  We  were  held  up,  too,  by  one  of  the 
ubiquitous  national  holidays.  The  second  of  November  was  the 
Di<i  dos  Finados,  a  sort  of  Brazilian  Memorial  Day  sacred  to  weeping 
and  the  laying  on  of  flowers — not  to  mention  flirting — in  all  the  ceme- 
teries, and  not  to  be  enlivened  by  mere  theatrical  performances.  Those 
of  the  undress  variety  "got  away  with  it"  by  announcing  a  "solemn 
program,"  but  when  I  protested  against  this  forced  holiday,  contrary  to 
contract,  the  irreverent  ex-bootblack  grew  wrathy  and  insisted  that 
on  such  a  day  our  show  was  "too  frivolous!" 

But  if  the  human  audiences  did  not  respond,  we  now  and  then  got 
proof,  sometimes  in  disastrous  form,  that  our  entertainment  was 
realistic.  In  several  of  the  barn-like  theaters  in  the  outskirts  of  Sao 
Paulo  we  were  obliged  to  "shoot  from  the  back,"  that  is,  the  projecting 
machine  was  set  up  at  the  rear  of  the  stage  and  the  pictures  were 
thrown  upon  the  back  of  the  curtain.  One  evening  some  friend  of 
the  stage  hands  brought  a  terrier  with  him.  Among  the  demonstations 
of  the  "Portuguese  Lecture"  with  which  we  opened  our  part  of  the 


282  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

program  was  a  collie  that  rushed  out  barking  upon  the  screen  stage. 
Barely  had  he  dashed  into  view  this  time  when  the  terrier  sprang 
madly  upon  him  and  all  but  wrecked  the  curtain  and  the  performance. 

It  was  not  until  the  fourth  of  November  that  my  real  job  began. 
Our  engagement  with  the  "Companhia  Brazileira"  was  drawing  to  a 
close  at  an  old  theater  out  by  the  gas-works,  and  the  hour  had  come 
for  me  to  find  out  whether  I  was  a  real  "movie"  magnate  or  merely  a 
ticket-taker;  for  the  carrying  out  of  a  contract  made  by  someone 
else  is  quite  a  different  thing  from  faring  forth  into  the  world  and 
making  contracts.  I  set  out  for  the  interior  of  the  State  of  Sao  Paulo, 
therefore,  with  misgivings,  not  only  as  to  my  own  abilities  but  because 
only  "Tut"  and  Carlos,  who  did  not  yet  speak  the  same  language,  were 
left  to  run  the  show. 

I  was  bound  for  Campinas,  third  city  of  the  state,  but  the  town  of 
Jundiahy  looked  promising  and  I  dropped  off  there.  It  was  a  strag- 
gling coffee  center  of  some  sixteen  thousand  inhabitants,  rather  pic- 
turesquely strewn  over  a  rolling  hillside,  at  the  summit  of  which 
bulked  a  big  yellow  building  bearing  the  familiar  name  "Polytheama." 
In  the  electric-light  plant  next  door  I  learned  the  name  of  the  manager, 
but  I  visited  a  dozen  other  buildings  before  I  ran  him  down,  only 
to  find  that  the  real  owner  and  contract-maker  was  the  prefect  and 
chief  mogul  of  the  town.  We  found  him  surrounded  by  much  cere- 
mony and  a  score  of  cringing  fellow-citizens  in  his  inner  sanctum  of 
the  prefcitura.  I  introduced  myself  with  as  brief  formality  as  possible 
and  told  him  that  the  Kmetophone  was  to  end  its  engagement  in  Sao 
Paulo  a  week  later  and  that  it  might  be  to  his  advantage,  as  well  as  to 
that  of  Jundiahy,  to  have  it  stop  there  for  the  night  of  Friday,  the 
thirteenth,  on  our  way  to  Campinas.  He  replied  that  he  had  made  a 
special  trip  down  to  Sao  Paulo  to  see  this  new  "marvel  of  the  American 
wizard,"  but  that  he  had  never  dreamed  we  might  be  induced  to  come 
to  Jundiahy.  He  was  highly  flattered,  but  could  he  and  his  modest  little 
town  really  afford  so  remarkable  an  entertainment?  I  offered  to  book 
the  attraction  for  a  hundred  and  fifty  dollars.  He  looked  up  the  rate 
of  exchange  in  the  Sao  Paulo  morning  paper,  smiled  sadly  over  the 
figures  he  penciled  on  the  margin  of  it,  and  regretted  that  it  was  im- 
possible to  pay  a  fixed  sum,  especially  in  such  hard  times. 

I  took  leave  of  him  and  turned  back  toward  the  station.  But  I  felt 
almost  superstitious  at  the  thought  of  failing  in  my  first  attempt  to 
make  a  contract  and  yielded  to  the  entreaties  of  the  manager  beside 
me  to  return  and  seek  some  other  basis  of  arrangement.    The  prefect 


A  SHOWMAN  IN  BRAZIL  283 

showed  more  pleasure  than  surprise  at  my  return  and  offered  to  rent 
me  the  "Polytheama"  for  one  night  at  80$,  we  to  pay  for  orchestra, 
hght,  hcense,  employees,  and  all  the  rest.  I  declined.  "Tut"  could 
scarcely  be  expected  to  handle  so  complicated  a  proposition  to  our 
advantage.  It  then  being  my  move,  I  dug  down  into  my  portfolio 
and  brought  forth  a  contract  which  Linton  by  some  stroke  of  luck  or 
genius  had  made  in  a  small  town  of  Chile,  giving  him  seventy  per  cent, 
of  the  gross  receipts.  I  would  gladly  have  accepted  the  "fifty-fifty" 
basis  on  which  we  were  then  playing,  rather  than  begin  with  a  failure, 
but  by  judicious  use  of  the  Chilean  contract  and  my  ever  improving 
Portuguese  I  got  the  prefect  to  offer  us  sixty  per  cent.,  and  having 
asked  and  been  refused  the  privilege  of  charging  to  his  account  the 
cost  of  our  transportation  from  Sao  Paulo,  just  in  order  not  to  seem 
too  eager,  I  agreed.  I  drew  up  duplicate  contracts  on  the  spot,  left 
a  reasonable  amount  of  advertising  matter,  and  still  had  time  to  snatch 
a  lunch  before  catching  the  next  train  north. 

It  was  mid-afternoon  when  I  reached  Campinas  in  its  lap  of  rolling 
coffee-clad  hills,  and  the  siesta  hour  was  not  yet  over.  I  took  a  tigre, 
a  two-wheeled  hack,  to  the  center  of  town,  and  having  installed  myself 
in  a  big  bare  front  room  of  the  principal  hotel,  began  my  professional 
inquiries  at  once.  The  important  theaters  were  the  "Casino  Carlos 
Gomes"  and  the  "Theatro  Rink."  The  former  looked  rather  small 
and  dainty  for  our  purposes;  besides,  it  ranked  as  a  municipal  play- 
house, and  I  did  not  yet  feel  like  going  into  politics  on  so  lavish  a 
scale.  The  "Rink"  was  a  great  barn  of  a  place  of  less  aristocratic 
appearance,  and  in  the  course  of  an  hour  I  coaxed  the  negro  boys  at- 
tached to  it  to  rout  out  the  manager.  He  was  a  plain,  business-like 
young  fellow  with  almost  American  ideas  of  advertising  and  manage- 
ment, and  we  were  soon  engaged  in  the  preliminary  matching  of  wits. 
I  drew  out  clippings,  old  programs,  articles  on  the  Kinetophone  from 
American,  Brazilian,  and  Spanish-American  papers  as  they  were  needed 
to  clinch  my  arguments,  and  as  he  grew  interested  we  sat  down  at  a 
table  on  the  gloomy  unlighted  stage  where  a  Portuguese  company  was 
stuttering  and  ranting  through  the  comedy  they  were  to  perpetrate 
that  night.  The  first  two  days  we  might  devote  to  Campinas  were 
much  more  important  than  the  one  I  had  booked  in  Jundiahy.  For 
one  thing  they  were  Saturday  and  Sunday,  and  in  addition  the  latter 
was  November  15th.  Brazil's  Second  Independence  day.  I  proposed 
that  we  play  five  nights  at  two  hundred  and  fifty  dollars  a  night.  The 
manager  smoked  half  a  cigarette  pensively,  then  said  tliat  if  I  had 


284  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

only  come  before  the  war  he  would  readily  have  consented,  but  that 
now  it  was  impossible.  I  sprang  the  incredible  Chilean  contract  on 
him.  No,  he  would  only  split  even,  and  there  we  stuck  for  some  time. 
He  was  adaptable,  however,  and  we  finally  came  to  an  agreement. 
He  was  to  double  the  price  of  admission,  advertise  "three  days  only" 
with  much  gusto,  including  a  special  street-car  covered  with  banners  and 
filled  with  musicians  to  parade  the  streets,  and  give  us  half  the  total  re- 
ceipts. On  the  less  important  days  of  Monday,  Tuesday  and  Wednes- 
day he  was  to  give  his  customary  subscription  section  without  our 
assistance,  we  to  appear  about  nine,  which  is  the  fashionable  hour  in 
larger  Brazilian  towns,  with  the  price  reduced  to  the  normal  one 
milreis — this  concession  to  be  kept  dark,  of  course,  until  the  double- 
priced  holidays  were  over — and  we  to  get  sixty  per  cent,  of  the  gross 
receipts  during  our  sections. 

My  misgivings  had  largely  taken  flight,  for  before  sunset  of  my 
first  day  "on  the  road,"  in  this  new  sense,  I  had  contracted  the  prin- 
cipal theaters  in  two  important  towns  at  better  terms  than  Linton 
himself  had  been  able  to  get  in  Brazil,  and  had  the  show  booked  for 
two  weeks  ahead.  It  took  me  all  that  evening  to  draw  up  the  con- 
tracts with  the  "Rink,"  write  the  contents  of  them  in  English  for  "Tut" 
and  in  Portuguese  for  Carlos,  and  explain  to  the  manager  our  several 
advertising  schemes,  but  I  went  to  bed  at  last  as  highly  satisfied  with 
myself  as  it  is  well  for  frail  humanity  to  be. 

After  so  good  a  day's  work  I  decided  to  allow  myself  time  to  look 
Campinas  over,  instead  of  departing  at  dawn.  It  is  a  place  of  con- 
siderable importance,  both  as  a  coffee  center  and  as  the  largest  and 
most  prominent  city  in  the  interior  of  the  State  of  Sao  Paulo.  Only 
a  few  years  before  it  had  been  a  focus  of  yellow  fever;  now  that 
scourge  had  disappeared  and  sanitation  seemed  to  have  come  to  stay. 
Any  city  on  earth  would  point  with  pride  to  the  rectangle  of  royal 
palms,  here  growing  unusually  far  inland,  which  surround  the  Largo 
Carlos  Gomes.  That  name  is  widespread  throughout  the  city,  for 
it  was  here  that  the  mulatto.  Gomes,  composer  of  the  opera  "O 
Guarani"  and  generally  rated  Brazil's  chief  musician,  was  born.  There 
is  a  statue  of  him,  baton  in  hand,  bronze  music-desk  behind  him,  in  a 
prominent  little  square  in  the  center  of  town — a  fragile  fellow  of 
typical  Brazilian  lack  of  physique,  overweighed  by  the  mass  of  un- 
barbered  locks  which  seem  to  be  the  sign  of  musicians  irrespective  of 
nationality.  Campinas  appears  to  have  a  special  trend  toward  music, 
for  it  is  also  the  birthplace  of  the  pianist,  Guiomar  Novaes. 


A  SHOWMAN  IN  BRAZIL  2^5 

The  train  sped  away  through  endless  rows  of  coffee,  stretching  out 
of  sight  over  rolHng  horizons.  The  region  seemed  more  fertile  than 
that  about  Sao  Paulo  city,  with  a  redder  soil,  though  this  may  01  ly 
have  been  because  here  it  had  recently  rained.  Unlike  those  elsewhere, 
the  Brazilian  coffee  bushes  stood  out  on  the  bare  hillsides  entirely 
unshaded,  the  fields  often  looking  as  if  they  had  been  combed  with 
a  gigantic  comb.  Within  an  hour  I  stopped  at  Villa  Americana,  a 
«imall  country  town  with  a  plow  factory,  a  cotton-and-ribbon-mill, 
and  a  fertile  landscape  in  every  direction.  It  is  the  railway  station  for 
large  numbers  of  Americans,  or  ex-Americans,  chiefly  farmers,  who  are 
scattered  for  many  miles  roundabout.  I  found  the  first  of  them  oppo- 
site the  station,  a  doctor  who  had  been  practicing  here  for  a  quarter 
of  a  century,  and  who  stepped  to  the  telephone  to  call  upon  one  of  the 
colony  to  act  as  my  cicerone.  The  youth  of  twenty  who  responded 
was,  in  dress,  looks,  manners,  and  speech,  a  typical  young  American 
of  our  southern  states,  but  he  was  a  native  of  Villa  Americana,  one  of 
many  children  of  a  white-haired  but  still  agile  man  of  aristocratic 
slenderness  who  lived  in  the  chief  mansion  of  the  town,  beside  1 
spireless  brick  Protestant  church  which  he  had  been  mainly  instru- 
mental in  building. 

In  1867  bands  of  disgruntled  Americans  from  our  southern  states 
emigrated  to  Brazil  and  settled  in  the  five  provinces  nearest  th-^ 
federal  capital,  where  they  were  later  joined  by  others  who  had  first 
tried  their  luck  in  the  Amazon  regions.  The  father  of  my  guide  and 
several  brothers  had  come  from  Georgia  with  their  father,  who  though 
he  had  been  a  merchant  at  home  and  was  seventy  years  old,  had  started 
anew  as  a  farmer.  The  present  head  of  the  family  had  served  two  years 
in  the  Confederate  army,  and  was  still  bitter  over  the  sufferings  of  his 
family  during  Sherman's  march  to  the  sea.  Virtually  every  American 
of  the  older  generation  in  this  region  had  fought  through  the  war  as 
"Johnny  Rebs,"  as  they  still  jokingly  called  themselves,  and  had  fled 
to  Brazil  soon  after  the  beginning  of  reconstruction  days  "to  escape 
carpet-baggers,  free  and  insolent  niggers,  and  because  we  fancied  the 
Yanks  were  going  to  eat  us  up ;  also  so  we  could  keep  slaves  again." 
They  still  called  Americans  of  the  North,  particularly  New  Englanders, 
"them  down  East  Yanks,"  and  seemed  hardly  to  recognize  that  the 
Civil  War  is  over.  Any  of  them  could  quickly  be  wrought  up 
into  a  heated  discussion  of  slavery,  the  character  of  Lincoln,  and  the 
other  questions  that  sent  the  founders  of  Villa  Americana  off  in  a 
huff  to  the  hills  of  Brazil.     The  Americans  were  the  first  to  bring 


286  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

modern  plows  into  the  country,  with  the  resultant  advantages  in  pro- 
duction when  high  prices  prevailed.  But  the  majority  spent  their 
fortunes  as  they  earned  them,  thinking  these  conditions  would  last 
forever,  and  to-day  they  are  little  more  prosperous  than  their  Brazilian 
neighbors.  Though  many  owned  slaves  up  to  1888,  there  seems  to 
be  no  bitterness  against  the  men  who  brought  about  emancipation  in 
Brazil.     They  had,  however,  by  no  means  lost  their  color-line. 

Most  of  these  transplanted  Americans  now  admit  that  they  would 
probably  have  done  better,  at  least  economically,  to  have  remained  in 
the  United  States,  but  none  of  them  seemed  to  be  thinking  of  re- 
turning. They  retain  the  good-heartedness  and  the  unassuming  hos- 
pitality of  the  southern  plantation  in  slave  days,  and  with  it  all  the 
old  class  distinctions  of  the  south.  Such  a  family  among  them  they 
spoke  of  as  "belonging  to  the  overseer  class,"  others  as  "right  low 
down  trash."  On  the  whole,  the  colony  seems  to  have  clung  rather 
tenaciously  to  the  American  standards  of  morality,  though  I  heard 
mention  of  exceptions  to  this  rule.  It  was  surprising  how  American 
the  better  class  families,  such  as  that  of  my  guide,  had  kept.  Thanks 
to  their  own  private  schools,  their  vocabularies  were  fully  equal  to 
those  of  the  average  educated  American,  though  their  pronunciation 
had  peculiar  little  idiosyncrasies,  such  as  giving  a  Portuguese  value 
to  the  letters  of  words  that  have  come  into  our  language  since  the 
Civil  War.  Even  the  men  who  were  born  in  the  United  States 
mixed  many  Brazilian  words,  particularly  of  the  farm,  with  their 
English.  Their  farm-hands  they  called  "comrades,"  though  these 
were  in  almost  every  case  black  and  little  more  than  peons,  earning 
an  average  of  2^500  a  day,  with  a  hut  to  live  in  and  room  to  plant  a 
garden  about  it,  if  they  chose,  which  few  of  them  did.  The  older 
men  spoke  Portuguese  with  the  same  ease  with  which  they  rolled 
and  smoked  cigarettes  Brazilian  fashion,  while  the  younger  generation, 
of  course,  preferred  that  tongue,  except  in  a  few  houses  where  the 
parents  had  insisted  on  English.  Among  the  "low  down  trash,"  most 
of  the  second  generation  was  said  to  know  no  English  whatever.  On 
the  whole,  the  colony  was  another  demonstration  of  the  fact  that 
South  America  does  not  assimilate  her  immigrants  to  any  such  extent 
as  does  the  United  States. 

When  we  had  eaten  a  genuine  Southern  dinner  of  fried  chicken  and 
all  that  goes  with  it,  the  son  "hitched  up"  and  drove  me  out  through 
eucalyptus  trees  and  whole  hills  of  black-green  coffee  bushes  to  visit 
another  American  family.     There  was  a  suggestion  of  our  southern 


A  SHOWMAN   IN  BRAZIL  287 

mountaineers  about  this  household,  the  women  diffident,  silent,  and 
keeping  in  the  background,  though  the  men  had  excellent  English 
vocabularies  and  the  mountaineer's  self-reliance.  Yet  they  were  not 
always  quite  sure  of  themselves  and  were  leisurely  of  wit,  with  a 
manner  which  proved  that  the  intangible  something  known  as  Amer- 
ican humor  is  the  result  of  environment  rather  than  bred  in  the  bone. 
The  colony  introduced  watermelons  into  Brazil,  but  the  fruit  is  nearly 
all  in  Italian  hands  now,  great  wagon-loads  of  them  having  passed  us 
on  their  way  into  town.  When  the  Americans  first  arrived,  they  had 
planted  much  cotton  and  sugar,  but  these  crops  have  been  almost  wholly 
abandoned,  and  they  rarely  raise  more  than  enough  coffee  for  their  own 
use,  giving  their  attention  chiefly  to  corn  and  beans. 

It  is  a  great  misfortune  to  Brazil  that  nearly  all  her  rivers  run  inland 
to  the  Plata  or  the  Amazon,  for  lack  of  this  natural  transportation  has 
undoubtedly  retarded  the  development  of  the  country,  though  it  has 
probably  also  abetted  the  development  of  railroads.  Particularly  in 
the  State  of  Sao  Paulo  there  is  perhaps  as  great  a  network  of  them 
as  anywhere  in  the  western  hemisphere  outside  the  United  States.  No 
fewer  than  five  systems,  better  laid  and  equipped  than  the  Brazilian 
average,  and  with  many  branches,  connect  Sao  Paulo  city  with  the  rest 
of  the  state  and  with  those  to  the  north  and  south,  while  a  few  months 
after  I  passed  that  way  one  of  these  opened  direct  rail  communication 
to  Corumba,  far  across  the  wilderness  of  Matto  Grosso  on  the  Paraguay 
river.  One  of  the  results  is  that  the  coffee  state  is  surprisingly  well 
developed,  with  many  important  towns,  vastly  more  agriculture,  and 
much  less  forest  than  the  imagination  pictures. 

As  far  as  Rio  Claro,  a  few  hours  north  of  Villa  Americana,  the 
railroad  service  was  excellent.  Beyond  that  large,  one-story,  checker- 
board, monotonous  town  ran  a  wood-burning  narrow-gauge,  the 
tenders  piled  high  with  cordwood.  Though  ours  was  a  "limited"  train, 
passing  many  stations  without  officially  stopping,  the  British  "staff" 
system  required  the  engineer  to  exchange  orders  with  every  station 
master,  and  made  it  necessary  to  slow  down  to  a  walk  at  every  settle- 
ment. The  farther  we  got  into  the  interior  the  more  often  were  we 
entrusted  to  wood-burners,  the  smaller  became  the  trains,  the  closer 
the  engines  with  their  deluge  of  smoke,  sparks,  and  cinders,  and  the 
more  we  pitched  and  rolled  along  the  narrow  tracks,  which  wound 
incessantly  among  low  hills.  The  landscape  grew  more  and  more 
wild,  almost  a  wilderness  in  places,  though  no  such  tropical  jungle  as 
I  had  imagined,  with  sometimes  no  real  stop  for  an  hour  or  more. 


288  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Sao  Carlos  was  a  lively  town  of  some  15,000  people  in  a  hollow 
among  rolling  hills,  its  houses  separated  by  masses  of  green  trees. 
There  were  plenty  of  Fords  at  the  station  and  swarms  of  carrcgadores, 
baggage-carriers  with  license  numbers  on  their  caps — you  could  n't  sell 
your  old  shoes  in  Brazil  unless  you  wore  a  license  showing  that  the 
politicians  had  given  you  permission  to  do  so.  Here  one  was  struck 
again  by  the  fact  that  great  competition  does  not  necessarily  mean 
low  prices.  Considering  themselves  lucky  to  get  a  job  or  two  a  day, 
these  carriers  growled  at  anything  less  than  a  milreis  for  the  slightest 
exertion,  and  expected  enough  for  carrying  a  suitcase  across  the  street 
to  keep  their  families  for  a  week. 

In  the  best  room  available  at  the  best  hotel  I  could  scarcely  turn 
around  without  barking  my  shins,  and  the  window  opened  so  directly 
on  the  sidewalk  that  the  shoulder  of  every  passer-by  seemed  to 
jostle  me.  The  weather  was  volatile  as  a  Brazilian,  with  heavy 
downpours  for  ten  minutes  alternating  with  ten  minutes  of  sunshine, 
I  waded  down  into  the  valley  through  wide  streets  reeking  in  blood- 
red  mud  and  up  to  the  "Theatre  Sao  Carlos,"  the  manager-owner  of 
which  I  at  length  unearthed,  in  spite  of  the  prevarications  of  his  negro 
servants.  As  usual  he  was  one  of  the  pillars  of  the  town,  of  that 
aristocratic  flimsiness  of  the  man  who  has  never  done  any  real 
work  for  generations  back,  and  his  air  said  plainly  that  he  knew  he 
could  outwit  any  simpleton  of  a  foreigner.  I  set  my  first  demands 
high,  therefore,  in  order  to  give  him  the  satisfaction  of  feeling  that 
he  had  driven  a  close  bargain  when  he  at  length  agreed  to  as  mucfc 
as  I  had  expected  and  ten  per  cent,  m.ore  than  I  would  have  accepted 
under  compulsion.  I  got  his  name  signed  to  duplicate  contracts  while 
he  was  still  under  the  influence  of  my  hypnotic  eye  and  was  giving 
him  instructions,  in  the  guise  of  information,  on  advertising  and  the 
arrangement  of  programs,  v/hen  he  remarked  casually: 

"Of  course  Edison  himself  comes  with  the  show?  Our  people 
will  be  as  anxious  to  see  him  as  to  get  acquainted  with  his  new  inven- 
tion, of  which  I  have  heard  such  splendid  reports." 

"Why — er — it  may  be  that  he  will  not  be  able  to  get  here,"  I 
stammered.  "You  see,  he  has  several  little  things  on  hand;  besides, 
he  is  a  married  man  and — and " 

How  excellent  my  Portuguese  and  my  winning  salesman  manner 
had  become  was  proved  by  the  fact  that  in  the  end  I  did  not  have  to 
abrogate  the  contract  for  two  days  at  the  "Theatro  Sao  Carlos." 

The  town  of  Araraquara  proved  to  be  of  about  the  same  size  and 


A  SHOWMAN  IN  BRAZIL  289 

activity  as  Sao  Carlos,  and  especially  well  off  in  public  buildings 
somewhat  out  of  proportion  with  its  general  appearance.  Clustered 
in  the  center,  about  the  large,  red-earth  pvaqa,  was  the  church,  an 
old  sheet-iron  playhouse,  an  ambitious  Municipal  Theater,  closed  as 
usual,  a  large  and  well-arranged  cinema  bearing  the  unescapable  name 
"Polytheama,"  and,  across  the  street  in  a  red  lot  of  its  own,  an 
ambitious  new  two-stoiy  building  labeled  in  English  the  "Araraquara 
College."  I  took  a  turn  through  several  of  the  wide,  irregular,  red- 
smeared  streets  to  make  sure  that  the  place  was  worth  playing,  then 
found  that  the  man  I  sought  was  also  manager  of  the  largest  store  in 
town,  next  door  to  his  playhouse.  He  proved  to  be  a  short,  unshaven 
young  Italian  who  had  not  been  long  in  Brazil,  which  accounted 
for  his  being  so  good-hearted  and  easy-going  that  I  had  no  difficulty 
in  taking  sixty-five  per  cent,  away  from  him  for  Saturday  and 
Sunday  night  performances.  I  might  have  had  as  large  a  share 
of  the  special  Sunday  children's  matinee,  but  as  what  had  become  a 
custom  required  him  to  distribute  candy  and  toys  to  the  children, 
I  took  pity  on  him  and  split  that  part  even. 

One  of  my  fellow-countrymen  was  head  of  the  college.  His  mo^t 
noticeable  characteristics  were  as  a  smoker  of  corn-husk  wrapped 
cigarettes  and  as  an  authority  on  the  history  of  Brazil.  He  had 
long  been  a  teacher  and  would  have  preferred  to  spend  his  summer 
vacations  in  the  land  of  his  forefathers;  but  these  came  in  December 
and  January,  when  it  is  cold  in  the  United  States,  and  it  would  take 
nearly  the  two  months  to  reach  and  return  from  there,  while  he 
could  cross  to  Lisbon  in  twelve  days  and  spend  most  of  his  vacation 
comfortably  tramping  about  southern  Europe.  His  Brazilian  wife 
a\id  two  bilingual  daughters  were  almost  American  in  point  of  view, 
though  by  no  means  in  appearance.  The  boys  of  Brazil,  the  head 
master  asserted,  arc  more  tractable  than  American  boys,  also  more 
superficial,  learning  more  easily  but  forgetting  much  more  quickly 
— a  statement  frequently  heard  from  American  educators  throughout 
South  America.  That  they  were  tractable  was  quickly  evident,  for 
when  a  native  teacher  sent  to  show  me  over  the  establishment  called 
a  boy  away  from  a  football  game — rugby  is  popular  even  with  work- 
men on  coffee  estates  in  Sao  Paulo  State — he  trotted  meekly  off  to  do 
an  errand  without  a  hint  of  resentment.  There  were  half  a  dozen 
American  boys  in  the  school,  all  Brazilian  born  of  men  from  our 
South,  and  not  merely  had  they  taken  on  many  of  the  characteristics 
of  their  companions,  but  they  had  washed-out  complexions  and  no 


290  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

suggestion  of  that  "scrappiness"  familiar  on  our  own  playgrounds. 
This  pastiness  of  skin  is  general  among  the  sons  of  northerners  born 
in  Brazil  and  quite  different  from  the  color  of  the  blonde  descendants 
of  Portuguese  in  whom  the  Goth  crops  out. 

Morally  the  head  master  had  been  thoroughly  Brazilianized.  He 
had  grown  tolerant  of  the  many  little  things  which  are  not  quite  as 
they  should  be,  having  lost  the  familiar  American  longing  to  reform 
the  world  and  fallen  into  many  of  the  lesser  vices  and  easy-going 
customs  of  Brazil.  He  had,  however,  introduced  coeducation  into 
his  school,  against  the  advice  of  the  natives,  because  he  believed  it 
necessary  to  proper  sex  development,  and  now  the  families  that  had 
been  most  strongly  against  it  sent  their  children  to  the  college.  In  the 
afternoon  we  drove  by  automobile  to  the  professor's  fruit-farm, 
which  a  former  slave  was  paid  75$  a  month  to  keep  in  order.  Two 
of  his  pickanninies  followed  us  around  like  pet  raccoons,  constantly 
holding  plates  of  fruit  within  our  reach,  and  the  atmosphere  of  the 
place  was  much  what  it  must  have  been  in  our  South  before  the  war 
when  the  "mastah"  visited  one  of  his  plantations.  On  our  return 
we  met  an  American  farmer  from  far  out  in  the  country.  He  had 
come  to  Brazil  twenty  years  before,  when  already  an  adult,  but  he 
spoke  English  with  considerable  difficulty  and  a  distinct  accent, 
though  his  Portuguese  was  by  no  means  perfect. 

Beyond  the  River  INIogy  Guassu,  the  first  I  had  crossed  since  leaving 
Sao  Paulo,  I  changed  from  the  "Paulista"  railway  system  to  the 
winding  and  narrow-gauge  "Mogyana."  We  passed  many  fields  of 
charred  stumps,  suggesting  how  matta  was  cleared  for  the  planting 
of  coffee.  The  rare  towns  were  monotonously  alike,  dull-white 
walls  and  red-tile  roofs  of  the  same  shade  as  the  soil,  which  turned 
all  light-colored  animals,  including  the  children  who  played  in  it 
and  the  men  who  worked  in  it,  a  pinkish  hue.  This  red  soil  is  the 
terror  of  housewives  in  Sao  Paulo  State,  especially  in  the  dry  season, 
when  it  sifts  thickly  over  everything  and  clings  tenaciously  to  every 
exposed  surface.  Soon  we  were  completely  surrounded  by  coffee 
fields,  sertoes  of  coffee,  a  world  absolutely  shut  in  by  coffee  bushes, 
which  actually  brushed  the  sides  of  the  train  and  stretched  away, 
endless  and  straight  and  unerring  as  the  files  of  a  well-trained  army, 
up  and  down  over  hill  and  dale,  with  never  the  slightest  break  in 
alignment,    into    the    dense-blue    horizon    for   mile   after    swift   mile. 

One  plantation  through  which  we  traveled  for  more  than  an  hour 
has   2,500,000   bushes;   an    English    corporation    owns    an    unbroken 


A  SHOWMAN  IN  BRAZIL  291 

sixteen  kilometers  of  coffee  trees,  crisscrossed  by  a  private  railway. 
Down  in  the  hollow  of  each  fazcnda,  or  section  of  plantation,  were 
long  rows  of  whitewashed,  tile-roofed  huts,  all  run  together  into 
one  or  two  buildings,  sometimes  with  a  church  attached.  These  were 
the  homes  of  the  colonos,  or  coffee  workmen,  once  negro  slaves,  now 
chiefly  Italians,  though  I  caught  glimpses  of  a  number  of  Japanese, 
the  women  still  in  their  native  dress  and  carrying  their  babies  on  their 
backs  by  bands  across  the  breast.  Some  years  ago  a  few  shiploads 
of  Japanese  were  sent  to  Brazil,  landing  in  Santos,  and  most  of  them 
came  so  directly  into  the  back  country,  and  are  so  nearly  segregated 
there,  that  even  their  racial  tendency  for  imitation  has  not  caused  them 
to  throw  off  home  customs.  Here  and  there,  too,  were  groups  of 
European  immigrants  still  in  the  costumes  of  their  homelands  in 
the  year,  in  some  cases  distant,  when  they  left  them.  Italian  coloniza- 
tion succeeded  negro  slavery  closely  in  Sao  Paulo  State,  which  owes 
its  prosperity  and  its  leadership  in  the  world's  coffee  production 
mainly  to  these  newcomers.  In  addition  to  their  living  quarters  and 
modest  wage=  the  colonos  are  usually  given  a  piece  of  ground  on 
which  to  plariv  orn,  black  beans,  and  mandioca  for  their  own  use, 
and  sometimes  permission  to  graze  a  few  head  of  stock.  One  of 
the  chief  troubles  of  the  coffee  fazcndeiro,  however,  is  the  tendency 
of  Italian  colonos  to  abandon  the  sun-drenched  fields  as  soon  as 
they  get  a  bit  of  money  together  and  go  to  town  to  engage  in  some 
minor  form  of  business. 

Coffee  blossoms  and  berries  are  often  found  on  the  same  bush 
at  the  same  time,  and  there  are  seven  grades  of  the  product,  according 
to  the  time  in  which  it  is  picked.  The  regular  harvest  is  from  ]\Iay 
to  July  or  August.  Then  the  ground  under  the  bushes  is  carefully 
swept,  if  it  is  smooth,  or  is  spread  with  cloth,  and  the  berries  are 
scraped  from  the  branches  with  one  motion  of  the  hand,  sparing 
as  many  leaves  as  possible,  after  which  all  is  swept  together  and 
sent  to  great  drying  platforms  that  look  not  unlike  concrete  tennis 
courts.  The  colonos  labor  on  the  piece-work  system,  each  family 
being  responsible  for  a  given  number  of  plants  and  the  picking 
being  paid  by  the  liter.  The  berries  are  planted  some  eight  feet 
apart  in  both  directions,  making  straight  rows  from  four  angles. 
It  is  better  to  set  out  young  plants  from  a  nursery,  but  this  is  too 
slow  a  process  for  large  plantations.  Some  of  the  land  was  formerly 
treeless  campo,  but  a  large  part,  and  the  most  fertile,  has  been 
cleared  of  dense  matta  in  the  crude  and  wasteful  way  of  pioneer 


292  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

communities,  leaving  only  here  and  there  a  majestic  tropical  tree 
topping  a  lidge.  The  plant  begins  to  produce  in  about  four  years, 
and  has  been  known  to  continue  to  the  age  of  a  hundred  and  thirty, 
growing  up  from  the  stump  as  often  as  it  is  cut  down.  An  ordinarily 
good  tree  will  produce  twenty-five  quarts  of  berries,  which  in  their 
maturity  considerably  resemble  small  cherries,  the  two  coffee  beans 
inside  requiring  contmual  attention  before  they  are  finally  dried  and 
sorted  and  disappear  in  sixty-kilogram  sacks  in  the  direction  of  Santos 
and  the  outside  world. 

The  plants  were  brought  to  Brazil  from  French  Guiana  long  ago, 
and  coffee-growing  was  a  paying  business  in  the  State  of  Sao  Paulo 
"until  the  government  heard  of  it."  The  number  of  non-producers 
who  get  a  finger  into  the  coffee  cup  before  it  reaches  the  actual 
consumer  is  beyond  belief.  Taxes  begin  with  so  much  per  thousand 
"feet"  of  plants,  and  continue  incessantly  until  the  product  reaches 
the  retail  market.  Transportation  from  the  field  to  Santos  is  ordi- 
narily two  or  three  times  as  much  as  from  Santos  to  New  York, 
and  a  sack  for  which  the  grower  received  ten  dollars  the  grocc 
in  the  United  States  has  been  known  to  sell  for  jrty-five,  even 
in  the  days  before  the  World  War  produced  so  many  experts  in 
profiteering.  It  is  often  asserted  that  the  coffee  fazcndeiro  makes 
more  profit  out  of  renting  the  bottom  lands,  where  the  danger  of 
frost  makes  the  planting  of  coffee  inadvisable,  as  chacaras,  or  small 
market  gardens,  or  from  the  catch  crops  that  can  be  planted  between 
the  rows  after  picking-time,  than  from  his  many  times  more  acres  of 
coffee-trees.  Throttling  taxes  are  his  greatest  trial,  and  the  prophecy 
is  frequently  heard  that  this  growing  habit  of  Brazilian  government 
will  eventually  ruin  the  great  coffee  industry  of  Sao  Paulo. 

At  sunset  we  coasted  down  into  Riberao  Preto,  fourth  city  of 
the  state,  in  the  bottom  of  a  great  shallow  bowl  of  earth  lined 
uninterruptedly  with  coffee  bushes  as  far  as  the  eye  could  reach. 
In  the  pink  glow  of  evening  a  carregador  put  me  and  my  baggage 
into  a  carriage  before  I  had  time  to  express  any  personal  desires  on 
the  subject,  and  I  was  driven  through  the  Saturday  night  activities 
of  a  lively,  rather  frontier-like  town  to  the  chief  hotel.  What  the 
other  half  dozen  in  town  must  have  been  I  dread  to  imagine,  for 
this  resembled  nothing  so  much  as  a  dingy,  careless,  unadorned,  lack- 
comfort  style  of  barn,  suggesting  that  I  was  getting  back  again  into 
the  real  South  America,  away  from  the  fringe  ot  near-civilization 
on  the  coast.     It  was  seething  with  travelers,  salesmen,  an  Italian 


A  SHOWMAN  IN  BRAZIL  293 

theatrical  company,  servants,  dogs,  and  innumerable  caged  parrots, 
and  I  was  assigned  another  of  those  intolerable  ground-floor  rooms 
opening  directly  on  the  street  that  are  unescapable  in  the  one-story 
towns  of  interior  Brazil.  Nor  had  I  had  time  to  test  the  one 
comfort  of  such  establishments,  the  shower  bath,  when  a  jangling 
bell  demanded  that  all  guests  come  to  supper  at  once,  on  penalty 
of  going  without  it  entirely. 

It  would  be  difficult  to  speak  kindly  of  Brazilian  hotels.  As  in 
Spanish- America,  nothing  but  black  coffee  is  to  be  had  until  ahnoco, 
or  "breakfast,"  between  ten  and  eleven,  which  is  followed  about 
sunset  by  jantar.  Both  these  meals  are  heavy,  lacking  in  everything 
but  quantity,  and  made  up  almost  entirely  of  meat.  This  came  vcrdc 
("green"  meat),  having  just  been  killed  and  so  called  to  distinguish 
it  from  xarque  or  came  secca,  the  salted  or  sun-dried  variety  familiar 
in  the  rural  districts,  is  cooked  in  several  different  ways,  all  of  which 
leave  it  hopelessly  tough.  Whether  in  hotels  or  railway-station 
restaurants,  the  menu  is  unvarying,  and  eight  or  ten  huge  plates  of 
meat  are  slapped  down  in  the  middle  of  a  long,  noisy,  public  table, 
where  each  guest  grasps  what  he  can  before  his  neighbors  make 
way  with  it.  To  save  time  or  trouble  all  dishes  are  served  at  once, 
and  are  habitually  cold  before  they  reach  the  ultimate  consumer.  There 
is  a  great  paucity  of  vegetables,  even  potatoes  being  considered  a 
luxury  and  rarely  reaching  the  interior  of  the  country.  Instead, 
there  stands  on  every  table  a  glass  jar  of  what  looks  like  coarse  yellow 
salt,  but  which  proves  to  be  farinJia,  flour  made  of  the  mandioca  or 
yuca  that  is  served  boiled  in  the  Andean  countries,  and  which  is 
used  throughout  Brazil  to  thicken  soups,  or  eaten  dry. 

The  hotel  proprietor  usually  gives  his  attention  exclusively  to 
the  bar,  which  he  claims  to  be  the  only  paying  part  of  his  establish- 
ment. By  night  a  servant  sleeps  just  inside  the  front  door,  leaving 
n>om  between  it  and  his  cot  for  the  belated  guest  to  squeeze  through ; 
in  the  day-time  the  patco  is  an  uproar  of  unguided  servants  and  ill- 
bred  children.  If  you  ask  to  have  your  bread  brushed  off  after  the 
waiter  has  dropped  it  on  the  floor  you  are  henceforth  known  as 
"that  curious  gringo";  if  you  prefer  your  coffee  or  soup  made  without 
having  an  unwashed  cook  frequently  dip  in  her  spoon  to  taste  the 
progress  and  toss  the  residue  back  into  the  pot.  there  is  just  one 
way  to  get  it — by  bringing  your  own  cook  with  you.  In  your  room 
the  mirror  is  certain  to  be  placed  at  about  the  height  of  the  average 
American's  be';:  buckle,  so  that  to  shave  requires  either  kneeling  or 


294  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

the  floor  or  sitting  on  something,  usually  not  to  be  found,  about  the 
size  of  a  soap-box.  Hot  water  being  unknown,  shaving  becomes  an 
ordeal  equal  to  trying  to  shut  out  the  sight  of  a  mulatto  across  the  table 
inhaling  a  mammoth  all-meat  meal  with  such  boa  constrictor  ease  that  he 
needs  only  to  give  the  tail  of  an  occasional  extra  large  mouthful  an 
affectionate  pat  with  his  knife  as  it  goes  down. 

Whatever  he  lacks  in  other  ways  the  typical  Brazilian  hotel-keeper 
makes  up  for  in  prices.  He  is  rarely  a  native,  and  you  can  scarcely 
expect  a  European  to  come  over  and  set  up  hotels  in  the  wilderness 
of  South  America  out  of  mere  love  for  his  fellow-man.  Usually 
his  only  interest  is  to  make  as  much  as  possible  as  soon  as  possible 
and  hurry  back  to  his  native  land.  Not  merely  are  the  rates  high, 
but  it  is  the  almost  invariable  custom  to  manipulate  the  items  in  such 
a  way  that  a  stay  of  twenty-four  hours  becomes  at  least  two  days. 
Personally,  I  early  adopted  the  habit  of  handing  the  proprietor  the 
amount  called  for  by  his  posted  daily  rate  and  assuring  him  that 
I  would  look  on  with  great  interest  while  he  collected  more  than  that; 
but  the  native  Brazilian  has  the  notion  that  he  loses  caste  if  he 
protests  at  any  price  charged  him,  so  that  the  foreigner's  refusal  to 
be  fleeced  is  sure  to  make  him  conspicuous,  even  if  it  does  not  cause 
his  fellow-guests  to  rate  him  a  freak  and  a  nuisance. 

Nearly  every  street  of  Riberao  Preto  runs  out  into  red  earth, 
a  tenacious  soil  that  is  tracked  along  the  sidewalks  and  into  every 
shop  and  dwelling,  until  the  whole  town  takes  on  a  reddish  tinge. 
Near  the  center  of  town,  at  the  lowest  spot  of  the  hollow  in  which 
it  is  built,  there  is  a  perpetual  frog  chorus,  and  from  the  outskirts 
coffee-fields  stretch  up  out  of  the  great  shallow  bowl  and  away  over 
endless  horizons.  The  Italian  company  announced  its  debut  on  the 
evening  after  my  arrival  by  shooting  off  fireworks,  one  advertising 
scheme  that  had  not  occurred  to  me.  There  were  so  many  cinemas 
in  town  that  I  had  to  spend  real  money  to  visit  several  of  them  before 
I  was  competent  to  decide  which  one  would  best  answer  our  purposes. 
All  those  of  importance,  it  turned  out,  from  the  municipal  "Theatro 
Carlos  Gomes,"  covering  a  whole  block  in  the  center  of  town,  down 
through  the  inevitable  "Polytheama"  to  the  loose-mannered  "Casino," 
flowing  with  liquor  and  aging  French  adventuresses,  were  in  the 
hands  of  a  hard-headed  Spaniard  of  long  Brazilian  experience,  so 
that  I  considered  myself  fortunate  to  get  his  name  at  the  bottom  of 
a  contract  giving  us  fifty-five  per  cent,  of  the  gross  receipts  during 
a  six-day  engagement. 


CHAPTER    XIII 

advi:ntures  of  an  advance  agent 

WE  STEAMED  for  hours  out  of  the  vast  coffee-Hned  basin 
of  Riberao  Preto  on  the  train  which  left  at  dawn  and  took 
all  day  to  get  to  the  next  town  of  any  size.  Coffee-fields 
at  length  gave  way  to  brush-covered  campo  and  grazing  cattle,  the 
train  winding  in  great  curves  around  slight  hills,  like  water  seeking 
an  outlet  or  a  lost  person  wholly  undecided  which  way  to  go.  Early 
in  the  afternoon  we  crossed  the  Rio  Grande  into  the  State  of  Minas 
Geraes,  which  at  once  showed  itself  less  developed,  more  dry  and 
sandy,  with  an  increasing  number  of  wooded  valleys  and  ridges. 
There  was  some  coffee  here,  too,  but  cared  for  in  a  half-hearted 
way  compared  with  the  great  plantations  of  Sao  Paulo.  We  passed 
a  large  gang  of  Japanese  workmen,  and  many  zebus  or  humped  cattle, 
both  in  the  fields  and  working  as  oxen.  The  ride  was  not  only  too 
dirty  and  dusty  to  be  pleasant,  but  sparks  from  our  wood-fired  engine 
poured  in  at  the  open  windows  until,  for  all  my  dodging  and  brushing, 
a  dozen  holes  were  burned  in  my  still  comparatively  new  movie- 
magnate  garb.  One  station  stood  3400  feet  above  sea-level,  and  we 
all  but  shook  ourselves  and  the  cars  to  pieces  as  we  rattled  down 
again  into  Uberaba,  at  an  elevation  of  2500,  just  as  day  was  escaping 
over  beyond  the  mountains. 

The  place  was  smaller  and  less  progressive  than  I  had  imagined, 
with  certainly  not  more  than  ten  thousand  inhabitants,  mstead  of 
the  25,000  credited  to  it  by  the  "Handbook  of  Brazil."  I  was  not 
over-anxious  to  make  a  contract  with  the  one  pathetic  little  cinema 
in  town,  at  least  until  I  had  seen  what  lay  beyond  and  decided  whether 
it  would  be  worth  while  to  come  this  far  inland.  The  manager,  a 
clerk  in  the  local  drug-store,  was  more  than  eager  to  present  so 
extraordinary  an  attraction  to  his  fellow-townsmen,  but  fares  and 
baggage  rates  would  have  cut  deeply  into  our  profits  and  I  refused 
to  sign  without  a  guarantee  of  a  conto  for  two  days'  performances. 
He  offered  800$  and  would  undoubtedly  have  given  almost  any 
percentage,  but  I  held  out  for  the  million  reis  until  we  finally  parted 
^ood  friends  but  not  business  associates, 

295 


296  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Somehow  I  had  always  thought  of  Minas  Geraes  as  rocky,  arid, 
dry.  and  cold,  something  like  upper  Peru ;  the  mere  name  "General 
Mines"  had  a  hard  and  chilly  sound  to  it.  But  long  before  noon 
in  Uberaba,  high  as  it  was,  I  was  reminded  that  it  is  well  north 
of  Rio  and  almost  tropical.  There  was  an  old  air  about  the  town. 
partly  because  the  humidity  causes  grass,  bushes,  and  even  trees  to 
grow  on  and  about  the  churches  and  other  loose-jointed  buildings  of 
stone  and  porous  bricks,  but  also  because  Minas  is  a  much  older 
state  than  Sao  Paulo,  overrun  by  miners  long  before  the  agricultural 
riches  of  its  neighbor  were  scratched. 

We  were  off  again  at  one  behind  the  same  old  narrow-gauge  wood 
burner,  through  a  rolling,  bushy  country,  and  scattered  with  huge 
ant-hills,  mildly  similar  to  the  Bolivian  Chaco.  The  only  real  town 
along  the  way  was  Uberabinha,  squatting  in  the  bottom  of  a  sandy 
and  shallow  valley,  inhabited  by  barefoot  and  red-earth  smeared 
people  whose  only  place  of  entertainment  seemed  to  be  the  double- 
towered  church  bulking  above  the  general  hut  level.  Night  was 
falling  when  we  pulled  into  Araguary  at  the  end  of  the  "Mogyana" 
railway.  The  tidal  wave  of  baggage-carriers  and  hotel  touts  was 
only  less  in  size  than  those  farther  south,  but  for  once  I  escaped  them 
entirely  by  putting  my  valise  on  the  head  of  a  negro  boy  and  wading 
through  the  mud  with  him  to  a  pensdo  run  by  an  old  woman.  The 
room  was  really  a  mud  cave,  the  mattress  filled  with  corn-husks,  and 
I  was  reduced  to  candle-light  for  the  first  time  in  Brazil.  But  the 
special  chicken  supper  was  a  great  relief  from  the  avalanche  of  meat, 
surrounded  by  wolfing  natives,  that  would  have  been  my  lot  at  a  hotel, 
and,  best  of  all,  the  pensdo  was  just  across  the  way  from  the  first 
station  of  the  "Goyaz  Railway,"  on  which  I  was  to  depart  at  dawn. 

It  was  pitch  dark,  with  frequent  heavy  showers,  when  I  set  out  to 
wander  incognito  through  the  town.  The  weak  electric-lights  along 
Its  mud-and-grass  streets  and  pragas  suggested  fireflies  or  will-o'-the- 
wisps  flitting  about  through  the  thick,  black  night.  There  was,  to  be 
sure,  a  dentist,  who  was  also  owner,  editor  and  printer  of  the  local 
paper,  and  the  town  undertaker — and  the  tombstones  behind  the 
lips  of  many  of  the  inhabitants  hinted  that  he  mixed  the  three 
professions. 

I  came  more  or  less  near  requiring  his  services  in  his  least  popular 
capacity.  As  we  were  drawing  into  the  station  the  mob  of  porters 
and  hackmen  had  given  me  their  special  attention,  one  negro  in  par- 
ticular  thrusting   his   uninviting    face    through    the   car-w^indow   an^ 


ADVENTURES  OF  AN  ADVANCE  AGENT     297 

pawing  me  with  his  long  unwashed  hands  in  tliat  half-afifectionate,  half- 
wheedhng  way  of  his  class  and  profession  throughout  Brazil,  at  the 
same  time  offering  his  undesired  services  some  seventy-five  times 
at  the  top  of  his  voice.  When  I  could  endure  him  no  longer,  I 
rapped  him  over  the  knuckles  with  the  handle  of  my  umbrella. 
Now  a  blow,  however  light  and  for  whatever  provocation,  is  a 
shocking  indignity  in  Brazil,  only  to  be  properly  wiped  out  in  blood. 
I  was  not  long,  therefore,  in  recognizing  the  fellow  again  when, 
during  my  stroll  about  town,  he  suddenly  bobbed  up  noiselessly  out 
of  the  night  and,  after  bawling  a  mouthful  of  vile  language  after  me, 
slipped  away  again  with  the  information  that  he  would  fix  me  yet. 
I  gave  him  no  more  attention  than  one  usually  does  a  half-drunken 
negro  in  tropical  lands,  and  had  entirely  forgotten  the  incident  when 
I  boarded  another  tottering  little  train  next  morning.  All  at  once 
a  sound  caused  me  to  look  up  from  my  reading  in  the  first-class 
car  I  was  sharing  with  one  other  passenger,  to  see  the  same  negro 
advancing  swiftly  down  the  aisle  toward  me,  grasping  a  long  and 
sinister-looking  knife.  It  was  my  luck  to  be  unarmed  for  the  first 
time  in  Brazil  that  I  had  needed  a  weapon,  having  left  my  revolver  with 
"Tut"  as  a  protection  for  the  money  he  might  take  in.  Even  my 
nmbrella,  which  would  not  have  been  wholly  useless  in  a  hand-to-hand 
encounter,  was  in  the  rack  above  me,  and  to  rise  and  grasp  it  might 
suggest  fear.  I  sat  where  I  was,  therefore,  with  my  feet  drawn 
up  on  the  opposite  seat,  where  they  could  shoot  out  quickly  if 
danger  became  really  imminent,  and  stared  at  the  fellow  with  the 
unwinking  eye  of  the  professional  lion-tamer.  Whether  it  was  this 
or  his  lack  of  any  other  intention  than  to  retrieve  his  reputation 
among  his  fellows  and  salve  his  injured  feelings  by  a  threatening 
gesture,  he  confined  himself  to  flourishing  the  knife,  advancing  several 
times  with  rolling  eyes  almost  to  within  reach  of  my  feet,  and  then 
backing  away  again.  Finally  he  retreated  toward  the  door  with 
an  expression  ludicrously  like  that  of  a  whipped  animal,  while  I 
rose  and  walked  leisurely  down  upon  him  with  the  same  fixed  stare 
until  he  stepped  to  the  ground.  During  it  all  neither  train  nor  local 
authorities  made  any  attempt  to  come  to  my  assistance,  and  I  carried 
away  the  impression  that  I  should  not  have  gotten  out  of  Araguary 
in  a  hurry  had  circumstances  forced  me  to  shoot  a  man  of  the  same 
color  as  the  majority  of  the  population. 

We  tossed  and  creaked  along  all  the  morning  to  cover  the  seventy 
miles  of  the  little  bankrupt  line  that  penetrates  the  southwesternmost 


298  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

corner  of  the  great  interior  State  of  Goyaz.  The  bustHng  modern 
civilization  of  Sao  Paulo  and  the  coast  had  gradually  petered  out 
to  nothing  more  than  two  telegraph  wires  jumping  from  pole  to 
crooked  pole  across  a  more  or  less  rolling  wilderness  of  bushy  forest, 
pura  niatta,  as  the  Brazilians  call  uncleared  country,  in  a  voice  almost 
of  terror.  Here  and  there  were  vast,  heavily  wooded  basins  around 
the  edge  of  which  we  slowly  circled,  fighting  wood-burner  sparks 
with  one  eye  while  taking  in  the  slight  scenery  with  the  other.  There 
was  a  bit  of  coffee-growing  and  a  bit  of  lumber  was  being  cut,  but 
as  a  whole  the  region  was  completely  undeveloped  and  unexploited. 
A  flaming  purple  tree  here  and  there  broke  the  rolling,  bushy,  brown 
monotony.  The  scant  population  was  a  sort  of  semi-wild  outcast 
of  civiHzation,  wedded  to  dirt  and  inconvenience,  living  in  open- 
work pole  houses  covered  with  aged  thatched  roofs  that  resembled 
dilapidated  and  sun-faded  straw  hats.  The  men  wore  wide  belts, 
with  many  silver,  or  imitation  silver,  ornaments  and  with  half  a 
dozen  leather  compartments  in  them  for  their  money  and  other 
small  possessions.  In  a  pocket  of  their  thin  cotton  coats  even  our 
local  fellow-passengers  carried  the  dried  covering  of  an  ear  of  corn, 
and  when  they  wished  to  smoke,  which  was  almost  incessantly,  they 
pulled  off  a  corn-husk,  shaped  it  with  a  knife,  rolled  it  up  and  put 
it  behind  an  ear,  cut  off  a  bit  of  tobacco  from  a  twist  plug,  crushed 
it  between  their  palms,  and  rolled  a  corn-husk  cigarette. 

At  eight  we  rumbled  across  the  River  Paranahyba  into  the  State 
of  Goyaz.  At  the  same  time  we  crossed  the  nineteenth  parallel  of 
latitude,  and  the  climate  should  have  been  warm  and  humid ;  but 
as  all  this  vast  tableland  averages  2500  feet  above  sea-level,  it  had 
distinctly  the  atmosphere  of  the  temperate  zones.  There  were  a 
few  cattle,  less  well-bred  than  those  of  Minas.  At  Goyandira,  a 
few  scattered  huts  beside  a  small  stream,  we  were  given  time  to 
gorge  the  customary  Brazilian  meal  on  a  table  already  crowded  with 
dishes  when  we  arrived,  and  at  eleven  we  drew  up  at  Catalao,  last 
outpost  of  civilization  in  this  direction,  and  a  personified  End  of  the 
Railroad. 

It  was  evident  at  a  glance  that  I  need  not  consider  Catalao  from  a 
business  standpoint.  Though  from  a  distance  it  had  looked  like 
quite  a  town,  it  was  merely  a  village  of  a  scanty  thousand  inhabitants 
scattered  along  a  small  creek,  with  mangos  trodden  underfoot,  its 
houses  built  of  mud  plastered  on  sticks  and  then  white-washed. 
Compared  even  with  the  Mineiros  over  the  nearby  state  border,  the 


ADVENTURES  OF  AN  ADVANCE  AGENT     299 

Goyanos  were  backwoodsmen ;  beside  the  energetic,  up-to-date 
Paulistas  they  had  the  vacant  expression  of  ruminating  cattle.  About 
the  town  an  almost  treeless  world,  rather  dry  for  lack  of  rain, 
stretched  endlessly  away  in  every  direction.  When  the  midday  heat 
had  somewhat  abated — for  there  was  nothing  cold  about  Catalao,  for 
all  its  altitude — I  climbed  to  a  barren  hillock  topped  by  an  old  ruined 
church  in  which  scores  of  black  rooks  had  built  their  nests  and  from 
which  bushy  and  rolling  Goyaz  spread  away  like  a  lightly  broken  sea. 
The  view  was  so  vast  that  one  could  see  the  curve  of  the  earth,  the 
blue  haze  ever  thickening  until  it  grew^  almost  opaque  on  a  horizon 
so  distant  that  it  seemed  raised  well  above  the  general  level.  The 
line  of  this  was  quite  distinct  for  its  entire  sweep,  yet  it  joined  almost 
imperceptibly  a  sky  heaped  and  piled  with  irregular  masses  of  white 
clouds  that  cast  their  broken,  fantastic  shadows  everywhere  across 
the  spreading  plains,  yet  did  not  conceal  overhead  the  sky  of  mother- 
of-pearl  tint.  Below,  the  village,  like  a  capricious  waif  that  has  come 
here  far  from  nowhere  out  of  mere  spite  or  unsociability,  made  itself 
as  comfortable  as  possible  in  its  shallow  hollow  among  dark-green 
masses  of  mango-trees.  Roads,  just  born  rather  than  made,  straggled 
out  of  it  in  all  directions,  soon  to  be  lost  in  the  green  and  haze-blue 
immensity,  as  if  man  had  dared  venture  only  a  little  way  out  into 
the  unpeopled  universe,  vast  and  trackless  as  the  sea.  A  few  venture- 
some fa::enda  houses  peered  forth  from  their  mango  groves  a  mile 
or  two  from  the  town,  but  these  did  not  noticeably  break  the  un- 
inhabited and  virgin  world,  the  scrtdo  or  matta,  which  mere  mention 
of  "the  plains  of  Goyaz"  calls  up  in  the  imagination.  It  was  a 
distinct  pleasure  to  be  again  entirely  beyond  the  hubbub  of  cities, 
beyond  the  reach  even  of  the  ubiquitous  trolley,  with  the  world  below 
deadly  silent  but  for  the  occasional  far  distant,  yet  piercing  scream 
of  an  ox-cart  creeping  imperceptibly  along  one  of  the  languid,  hap- 
hazard, straggling  trails  that  appeared  from  somewhere  out  in  the 
wilderness.  They  sounded  like  factory  whistles,  these  distant  carros 
de  boi,  with  their  solid  wooden  wheels  and  total  innocence  of  grease 
on  their  turning  axles,  the  scream  of  which — cliiar,  the  Brazilians 
call  it,  aping  the  sound — ceased  at  length  abruptly  before  the  principal 
shop,  run  by  a  "Turk,"  where  the  eight  or  ten  oxen,  steered  by  a 
driver  who  prodded  them  in  the  neck  with  a  goad  lying  over  his 
shoulder  without  so  much  as  glancing  back,  and  whom  they  followed 
unerringly,  fell  into  the  spirit  of  the  scene,  the  silence  broken  now- 
only  by  the  occasional  sharp,  vexed  note  of  a  worried  rook  and  the 


300  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

somnolent  humming  of  flies.  The  End  of  the  Railroad  means  far 
away  and  quiet,  indeed,  in  these  seething  modern  days.  Before  long 
we  may  not  be  able  to  find  it  at  all;  yet  one  feels  at  times  impelled 
to  come  to  such  ends  of  the  road  and  climb  to  a  high  place  overlooking 
the  world,  there  to  sit  and  unravel  the  tangled  threads  of  life  into 
some  semblance  of  order  again  before  descending  to  plunge  once  more 
headlong  into  the  fray. 

The  worst  of  coming  710  miles  up-country  from  Santos — and  the 
time  it  had  taken  made  it  seem  ten  times  that — was  that  I  must  spend 
as  long,  without  even  the  reward  of  new  sights  and  experiences, 
to  come  down  again.  The  same  glorified  way-freight  carried  us 
southward  in  the  morning,  and  for  once  it  was  crowded.  Not  only 
were  there  all  my  fellow-guests  at  the  run-down  hovel  owned  by 
a  "Turk"  who  had  lived  so  long  in  Brazil  that  he  seemed  to  prefer 
Portuguese  to  his  native  Arabic,  all  of  whom  had  spent  the  night 
playing  some  noisy  form  of  poker,  but  a  new  fork  of  the  railroad 
was  being  opened  that  day  to  Roncador  ("Snorer,"  it  would  be  in 
English),  and  everyone  in  Cataliio  who  owned  shoes  had  been 
invited  to  ride  out  and  help  inaugurate.  In  consequence  our  tiny 
two-car  train  was  so  densely  packed  with  well-meaning  but  unpleasing 
mortals  of  all  ages,  sexes,  sizes  and  colors  that  we  mere  ticket-holders 
were  crowded  out  of  seats  and  forced  to  stand  on  the  swaying  plat- 
forms as  far  as  the  junction  of  Goyandyra.  There  we  had  to  go 
without  "breakfast,"  because  the  inaugurators  assaulted  the  limited 
table  supplies  in  such  force  that  passengers  could  not  get  within 
grabbing  distance.  It  was  perhaps  as  well,  for  hunger  is  slight 
suffering  compared  with  watching  at  close  range  the  contortions  of 
such  a  throng  stoking  away  whole  knife-lengths  of  those  viands  which 
they  did  not  spill  on  the  earth  floor. 

Below  Uberaba  the  "Mogyana"  branches,  giving  me  new  territory 
all  the  way  back  to  Campinas.  Most  of  it  looked  unpromising  for 
our  purposes,  until  nightfall  brought  me  to  Franca,  only  three  hours 
north  of  Riberao  Preto  and  the  terminus  of  a  daily  express.  Here 
were  two  cinemas,  side  by  side  on  the  central  praca.  I  drifted  into 
one  of  them  and  handed  my  card  to  the  owner-manager.  When 
the  crowd  at  last  gave  us  a  chance  to  talk  it  over,  I  set  my  remarks 
to  the  tune  of  "Oh,  this  is  an  unimportant,  far-away  little  place  and 
I  don't  believe  we  will  bother  with  it."  The  result  was  that  I  soon 
had  the  man  all  but  on  his  knees  to  have  us  come.  He  offered  to 
rent  the  theater  for  ten  per  cent,  of  the  total  receipts,  and  when  I 


ADVENTURES  OF  AN  ADVANCE  AGENT     301 

declined  tlie  trouble  <jf  staging  the  affair  ourselves,  he  begged  me 
to  let  him  do  everything  and  take  as  our  share  seventy  per  cent,  of 
the  proceeds.  At  last  1  had  equalled  that  fabulous  Chilean  contract! 
Indeed,  had  I  been  born  with  a  mean  disposition  I  fancy  I  could 
have  made  that  pillar  of  Franca  do  anything,  short  of  presenting  me 
with  his  playhouse,  to  keep  me  outside  the  doors  of  his  hated  rival. 

I  was  gone  again  at  sunrise  and  know  naught  of  Franca,  except 
what  may  be  seen  at  night  and  one  added  bit  of  information.  It 
has  a  match  factory  in  which  a  huge  stock  of  an  article  that  the 
region  still  imports  from  the  outside  world  is  locked  up  by  government 
order  because  the  owners  cannot  raise  the  seven  contos  in  twenty-reis 
stamps  needed  to  decorate  the  boxes  before  they  can  be  placed  on 
the  market.  Only  once  during  that  day's  journey  did  I  halt.  At 
Cascavel,  fittingly  named  Rattlesnake,  I  took  a  branch  line  into  the 
cool,  grassy  uplands  of  the  "Brazilian  Switzerland"  and  spent  the 
night  in  Poqos  de  Caldas.  This  is  far-famed  throughout  the  country 
as  a  watering-place  at  a  goodly  elevation  for  Brazil,  with  sulphurous 
hot  springs  much  frequented  by  well-to-do  natives  during  the  season. 
But  that  was  over ;  the  barracks-like  hotel  with  its  monasterial  cells 
of  rooms  had  only  a  scattering  of  guests,  and  there  was  no  visible 
reason  why  the  Kinetophone  should  journey  to  a  spot  that  had  fallen 
upon  such  lean  days.  Half  a  day  south  I  might  have  taken  a  direct 
line  from  Mogy  Mirim  to  Rio,  but  it  was  eleven  days  since  I  had 
heard  our  artists  sing  or  learned  hOw  things  were  faring  with  my 
two  companions  without  a  tongue  between  them.  I  hurried  on, 
therefore,  to  Campinas  in  time  to  be  refused  admittance  to  our 
first  performance  at  the  "Rink" — until  the  youthful  manager,  catching 
sight  of  me.  thrust  the  doorkeeper  aside  with  extended  hand. 

I  found  "Tut"  and  Carlos  conversing  freely  together  in  a  language 
that  was  not  Portuguese  and  certainly  was  not  English.  In  Jundiahy 
they  had  carried  out  my  first  contract  so  well  in  the  face  of  rainy 
weather,  toboggan  streets  of  uncobbled  red  mud,  and  a  reputation 
as  a  "poor  show  town,"  as  to  win  high  praise,  while  even  here  in 
such  a  metropolis  as  Campinas  they  showed  every  evidence  of  being 
able  to  give  their  performance,  watch  the  doors  and  at  least  count 
the  "deadheads,"  and  collect  our  share  of  the  money  without  my 
assistance.  The  manager  of  the  "Rink"  had  lived  up  to  his  promise 
in  the  matter  of  advertising,  and  had  sent  a  street-car  carrying  a  band 
and  entirely  covered  with  posters  and  the  likeness  of  Edison  over 
every   trolley-line   in    town.     Yet   our   audiences    were    not   all    they 


302  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

should  have  been  on  Brazil's  second  Independence  Day,  whether  by 
reason  of  the  possibility  of  a  political  upheaval  at  the  change  of 
the  national  administration,  that  musical  Campinas  was  too  "high- 
brow" for  what  Edison  had  to  offer,  or,  as  we  suspected,  because 
city,  state  and  nation  were  beginning  to  feel  seriously  the  pinch  of 
the  "brutal  hard  times." 

On  the  morning  after  our  Campinas  engagement  the  show  and  I 
again  parted  company.  While  the  former  sped  away  up  the  broad- 
gauge  "Paulista"  to  Sao  Carlos  and  points  beyond,  I  took  the  slow 
and  narrow  "Mogyana"  back  the  way  I  had  come,  intending  to  catch 
the  noon  train  westward  from  Mogy  Mirim  toward  Rio.  But  the 
pleading  of  a  compatriot  slightly  altered  my  plans.  In  Campinas  we 
had  made  the  acquaintance  of  a  man  from  New  York  and  Jerusalem 
who  was  misusing  his  racial  talents  in  strenuous  efforts  to  refute, 
in  the  interests  of  an  American  insurance  company,  the  Brazilian 
argument  of  "But  why  should  I  have  my  life  insured  and  leave  my 
wife  a  lot  of  money  to  spend  on  some  other  man  when  I  die?"  Ideas, 
specially  those  with  a  $  attached,  sprouted  overnight  in  the  fertile 
brain  of  my  misplaced  fellow-countryman,  and  bright  and  early  that 
Thursday  morning  he  came  running  down  to  the  station  with  a  new- 
one.  He  had  suddenly  seen  a  chance  to  retrieve  recent  bad  fortune 
by  hiring  the  Kinetophone  outright  at  the  conto  for  two  nights  which 
I  had  set  as  the  fixed  price  for  small  towns  and  taking  it  out  to  his 
old  stamping-ground  of  Amparo,  where  he  proposed  to  enlist  the 
services  of  his  bosom  companions,  the  priests,  nuns,  and  other  Biblical 
influences  of  the  town,  into  selling  tickets  beforehand  on  the  church- 
festival  plan.  I  am  always  ready  to  let  a  man  make  money,  especially 
if  he  makes  some  for  me  at  the  same  time,  so  we  dropped  oft"  at  Jaguary 
and  took  the  branch  to  Amparo. 

It  was  an  unusually  pleasing  little  town  for  Brazil,  with  all  its  streets 
paved  in  stone  blocks,  several  pretty  little  parks,  and  spread  along  so 
narrow  a  valley  that  one  could  fancy  the  beans  from  its  coffee-clad 
hills  rolling  right  down  into  the  central  praga  ready  for  roasting.  But, 
like  all  the  State  of  Sao  Paulo,  Amparo  had  unwisely  put  all  its  eggs 
in  one  basket — the  coffee  basket — and  whereas  ten  milreis  an  arroba 
is  considered  by  coffee-growers  only  a  fair  price,  Brazil's  chief  export 
was  then  selling  for  3$5oo !  Hence  the  town  was  "muito  ruim,"  cold, 
stony  dead  from  the  theatrical  point  of  view,  and,  though  there  was 
a  nice  little  theater  with  cozy  seats  and  plenty  of  boxes  for  the 
"excellentissimas   familias,"  the  impresario  had   lost  his   nerve  com- 


ADVENTURES  OF  AN  ADVANCE  AGENT     303 

pletely.  When  my  friend  and  guide  gently  mentioned  600$  a  night  as 
the  bargain  of  a  Hfe-time,  the  manager  all  but  swallowed  his  neck,  then 
recovered  sufficiently  to  say  that  a  Portuguese  company  of  the  type 
most  beloved  in  Brazil  had  given  a  first-night  the  week  before,  after 
an  uproar  of  advertising,  and  had  taken  in  just  25$!  I  immediately  lost 
all  desire  to  bring  the  Kinetophone  to  Amparo,  though  my  friend  from 
Manhattan  and  the  Holy  Land,  with  the  admirable  buoyancy  of  his  race, 
went  up  to  the  convent  school  to  talk  it  over  with  the  mother  superior, 
and  saw  his  efforts  crowned  with  success — to  the  extent  of  an  invitation 
to  dinner. 

From  Mogy  IMirim  a  shaky  little  train  carried  me  westward  through 
more  wilderness  than  coffee,  past  the  lively  little  town  of  Itapira  roofing 
a  slight  hill,  to  a  helterskelter  village  called  Sapucahy,  where  it  unloaded 
us  on  a  platform,  bag,  baggage,  and  bathrobes,  and  backed  away.  As 
frail  a  train  backed  in  from  the  other  direction  and  loaded  us  up  again, 
all  the  Brazilian  travelers  paying  carrcgadorcs  to  set  their  bags  down 
from  the  windows  and  up  again,  and  after  more  than  an  hour  of  fuss 
and  frustration  we  creaked  on.  The  yellow  creek  of  Sapucahy,  it 
transpired,  was  the  boundary  between  Sao  Paulo,  where  the  "Mog- 
yana's"  concession  ended,  and  the  State  of  Minas  Geraes,  where  we 
had  been  taken  in  charge  by  the  "Rede  Sul  Mineira,"  a  branch  of  the 
"Brazilian  Federal  Railways." 

The  land  was  somewhat  swampy  now,  more  wild  and  unsettled,  with 
parasol  pine-trees  beside  slender,  undeveloped  palms  with  thin  tufts 
of  disheveled  foliage.  The  town  of  Ouro  Fino  ("Fine  Gold")  was 
a  small,  off-the-main-line  sort  of  place,  but  here  the  daily  train  got 
in  at  five  at  night  and  did  not  leave  until  five  in  the  morning,  so 
whatever  we  might  make  would  be  money  in  pocket.  After  supper 
I  set  out  on  the  steep  hillside  up  which  the  town  is  built  and  down 
Avhich  run  red  mud  streets,  and  at  length  found  at  his  club — the  club, 
in  fact — the  manager  of  the  local  theater,  a  tar-brushed  youth  of 
aristocratic  manners,  or  at  least  gestures,  who  naturally  accepted  and 
signed  without  argument  the  contract  I  handed  him.  Upon  my  return 
to  the  hotel  I  found  the  dingy-looking  room  I  had  left  an  hour  before 
gay  with  speckless  white  bedclothes  and  fancy  mosquito  canopy, 
evidently  in  honor  of  the  large  theatrical  troupe  which  rumor  already 
had  it  would  soon  be  following  in  my  wake.  Our  train  stood  all 
night  just  outside  my  window,  giving  me,  perhaps,  too  great  a  feeling 
of  security,  for  I  was  all  but  left  behind.  It  was  already  pulling  out 
toward  a  faint  crack  in  the  darkness  when  I   scrambled  on  board. 


304  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

breakfastless  and  not  fully  dressed,  and  with  the  privilege  of  paying 
a  fifty  per  cent,  fine  on  my  ticket  for  not  having  bought  it  at  the 
station. 

Long  piles  of  wood  for  the  locomotives  stood  along  the  way  through 
a  wilderness  inhabited  by  "poor  white  trash"  in  rags  smeared  with 
red  earth,  who  crowded  to  the  doors  of  their  thatched  huts  as  we 
passed.  For  some  time  we  followed  the  Sapucahy,  swollen  red  with 
floods  that  gave  a  picturesque  appearance  to  the  hilly  village  of  Itajuba 
on  its  banks.  This  was  a  friendly  little  town  where  everyone  spoke 
to  strangers,  after  the  pleasant  manner  of  back-country  districts,  but 
though  it  has  an  important  engineering  school,  it  is  little  more  than 
a  grass-grown  hamlet,  with  a  populous  cemetery  conveniently  situated 
on  a  hill  close  above  it,  so  that  all  the  inhabitants  can  drink  to  their 
ancestors.  Itajuba  was  just  then  the  object  of  a  general  interest  out 
of  all  keeping  with  its  size.  Just  next  door  to  the  "Cinema  Edison" 
in  which  I  arranged  for  our  appearance  was  the  modest  home  of  the 
new  president  of  Brazil.  There  he  had  lived  most  of  his  life — even 
since  his  election  on  March  first,  though  he  was  "Dudu's"  vice- 
president  and  required  by  the  constitution  to  preside  over  the  senate — 
and  he  had  left  less  than  a  week  before  for  his  inauguration. 

The  train  next  set  me  down  at  Caxambu,  another  of  the  watering- 
places  on  the  irregular  line  across  southwestern  Minas,  where  the 
rolling  country  from  the  Plata  northward  begins  to  break  up  almost 
into  mountains  and  produces  a  stratum  of  hot  and  cold  mineral  springs. 
Huge  hotels  accommodate  those  who  come  to  "take  the  waters"  in 
Caxambu,  as  in  Pogos  de  Caidas  not  far  distant,  and  a  mineral  water 
that  sells  all  over  Brazil  at  a  milreis  or  more  a  small  bottle  is  here 
as  free  as  the  air.  The  largely  negro  and  barefoot  local  population 
comes  in  a  constant  stream,  carrying  every  species  of  receptacle,  to 
a  low  spot  in  the  center  of  town  in  which  the  water  bubbles  up  in- 
cessantly, and  where  all  manner  of  paupers  and  loafers  sit  under  the 
feathery  plumes  of  waving  bamboos,  drinking  in  turn  out  of  a  broken 
bottle. 

The  same  ancient,  dirty,  German-made  cars  that  had  bounced  me 
into  Caxambu  bounced  me  out  again  in  the  afternoon,  and  all  the  rest 
of  the  day  I  bumped  along  at  the  tail  end  of  a  way-freight  that  seemed 
constantly  on  the  point  of  falling  to  pieces  as  it  thundered  in  and  out 
of  the  hills  on  a  warped  and  unrepaired  old  track.  To  the  north 
the  earth  lay  piled  high  into  the  heavens,  for  Minas  has  some  real 
mountains.     Swift  tropical  darkness   fell,  and  we  went  banging  on 


ADVENTURES  OF  AN  ADVANCE  AGENT     305 

into  the  night,  our  old  wood-burner  leaving  a  trail  of  fireworks  behind 
us  that  gave  it  the  suggestion  of  some  fire-spitting  dragon  of  medieval 
legend,  and  yanking  us  at  last  into  Cruceiro.  Xext  morning  I  took 
the  direct  line  from  Sao  Paulo  to  Rio,  and  it  was  pleasant  indeed 
to  ride  once  more  on  a  broad-gauge,  roomy,  coal -burning  train.  Rain 
had  given  the  country  an  aspect  quite  different  from  that  of  two 
months  before,  but  nothing  could  disguise  the  lesser  industry  and 
progress  toward  civilization  in  the  State  of  Rio  de  Janeiro  than  in 
that  of  Sao  Paulo.  Rezende,  the  first  town  over  the  boundary,  proved 
to  be  a  village  posing  as  a  city,  a  ragged,  barefoot  place,  overrun  with 
dust  and  squalor,  with  ambitionless  loafers  and  negro  good-for- 
nothings.  Professionally,  too,  it  was  a  shock;  far  from  finding  it 
worthy  of  a  Kinetophone  performance,  we  could  not  have  given  a 
dog-fight  there  to  advantage. 

The  slightly  fertile  country  began  at  length  to  tip  downward  and 
we  descended  through  long  tunnels  between  vast  opening  vistas  cut 
off  at  some  distance  by  a  great  blanket  of  fog  coming  up  from  the 
sea.  At  Belem  there  was  already  an  atmosphere  of  Rio,  still  some 
thirty  miles  away,  with  frequent  towns  and  suburban  service  from 
there  on,  though  we  halted  only  at  Cascadura  and  drew  up  at  length 
in  the  familiar  scent  and  hubbub  of  the  capital.  Carregadores  snatched 
my  belongings  without  so  much  as  "by  your  leave"  and  bundled  me 
into  a  taxi — which  reminds  me  that  inside  my  unlocked  valise,  that 
had  been  tossed  about  and  left  lying  in  all  manner  of  places  since 
leaving  Campinas,  there  were  a  million  and  a  half  reis  of  our  earnings 
in  Brazilian  bills.  One's  possessions  are  so  much  safer  under  such 
circumstances  in  South  America  than  in  the  United  States  that  what 
would  seem  criminal  carelessness  in  the  north  becomes  a  common 
habit. 

It  was  like  getting  home  again  to  hear  the  newsboys  bawling  "A 
Riia!"  "A  Noite!"  "Ultimas  Noticias!"  in  the  gutteral  throat-growl 
peculiar  to  Rio,  to  be  accosted  by  the  same  old  lottery-ticket  vendors, 
the  same  street-car  conductors,  to  see  the  same  "women  of  the  life" 
strolling  the  Avenida  and  riding  invitingly  back  and  forth  on  the 
first  section  of  the  "Botanical  Garden  Line."  There  was  almost  a 
monotony  of  famihar  faces,  so  accustomed  had  I  been  for  years  to 
always  seeing  new  and  strange  ones.  The  "Sugar  Loaf,"  hump- 
shouldered  Corcovado,  top-sail  Gavea,  lofty  Tijuca,  and  all  the  rest 
still  looked  serenely  down  upon  the  human  ants'  nests  at  their  feet 
with  the  immutability  of  nature's  masterpieces 


3o6  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Yet  Rio  was  different  than  I  had  first  known  it.  Had  I  left  it  for 
good  and  all  when  I  had  expected,  I  should  have  had  a  better  impression, 
but  a  false  one ;  I  should  have  known  only  the  winter  Rio,  which  is 
magnificent  and  has  little  in  common  with  Rio  of  the  summer-time. 
Statisticians  assure  us  that,  thanks  to  the  trade  winds  and  its  greater 
proximity  to  the  ocean,  Brazil's  metropolis  falls  several  degrees  short 
of  Buenos  Aires  in  the  most  infernal  months  of  the  year,  but  it  is 
doubtful  whether  anyone  except  the  thermometer  recognizes  the  ad- 
vantage. In  late  November  it  lay  sweltering  under  a  lead-heavy 
blanket  of  heat  that  drenched  one  at  the  slightest  exertion,  mental, 
moral,  or  physical.  No  sooner  did  one  put  on  a  collar  than  it  melted 
about  the  neck — and  not  only  is  a  fresh  white  collar  indispensable  in  Rio, 
but  they  cost  sixty  cents  each  and  twelve  cents  a  washing,  and  rarely 
outlive  more  than  four  journeys  to  the  beat-'em-on-a-rock  style  of 
Brazilian  laundries. 

There  was  less  evidence,  however,  than  I  expected  of  the  rioting 
that  had  marked  the  change  of  administration  a  few  days  before, — 
a  few  broken  windows  between  the  office  of  O  Paiz,  chief  journalistic 
supporter  of  "Dudu,"  and  our  first  Brazilian  playhouse,  a  bullet-mark 
in  a  stone  or  brick  wall  here  and  there  to  recall  the  battling  hordes 
that  had  surged  up  and  down  the  Avenida.  The  trouble  had  started 
on  the  eve  of  the  inauguration  of  the  man  from  Itajuba.  Among 
"Dudu's"  Machiavellian  bag  of  tricks  was  a  company  of  government 
bouncers  and  strong-arm  men  under  command  of  a  ruffian  known  as 
Lieutenant  Pulcherio.  On  Saturday  night,  in  the  last  hours  of  the 
detested  regime,  the  lieutenant  and  his  fellow-officers  were  discussing 
their  glorious  past  over  a  quiet  whiskey-and-soda  in  the  Hotel  Avenida 
bar  when  a  group  of  the  populares  they  had  so  long  oppressed  stopped 
to  mention  what  they  thought  of  them.  The  political  protegees  replied 
to  this  vile  affront  to  their  noble  caste  by  firing  on  and  attacking  with 
swords  the  mainly  weaponless  populares,  and  among  other  gallant  deeds 
worthy  of  their  past  killed  a  negro  newsboy  of  twelve.  The  povo, 
however,  for  once  vulgarly  resisted  their  noble  superiors  by  laying 
hands  on  bricks  and  cobblestones  and  weltering  back  and  forth  across 
the  Largo  da  Carioca  and  the  Avenida,  managing  in  the  process  to 
prepare  the  beloved  Lieutenant  Pulcherio  for  funeral. 

Early  the  next  morning  the  opposition  newspapers  were  already 
pouring  out  their  pent-up  spleen  on  the  head  of  the  outgoing  president, 
resurrecting  censored  articles  and  deluging  the  disappearing  adminis- 
tration with  vituperation.     The  names  they  called  the  "odious  gaucho" 


ADVENTURES  OF  AN  ADVANCE  AGENT     307 

were  scarcely  fit  to  print ;  those  applied  to  "Dudu"  sometimes  had  the 

genius  of  intense  exasperation.     There  were  columns  of  such  gentle 

remarks  as : 

The  four  years  now  terminating  mark  the  blackest,  the  most  nefast 
page  in  our  history,  the  most  painful  calamity  with  which  Providence  has 
flagellated  us  since  Brazil  was  Brazil.  During  the  administration  of  the 
analphabetic  sergeant  who  got  possession  of  the  chief  power  by  knavery 
and  the  imposition  of  the  barracks,  justice  was  disrespected  and  reviled, 
immorality  created  rights  of  citizenship,  robbery  and  corruption  ruled 
unrestrained.  There  has  not  been  a  day  since  the  inauguration  of  this 
unpleasant  mediocrity,  degenerate  nephew  of  our  great  Deodoro,  that  the 
President  of  the  Republic  and  his  auxiliaries  did  not  go  back  on  their 
plighted  word,  in  which  there  was  not  registered  a  new  political  infamy,  in 
which  we  did  not  hear  of  a  new  crime  or  a  new  immorality.  Praise  God, 
this  terrible  four  years  of  darkness  is  ended! 

The  inauguration  took  place  in  the  early  afternoon  of  Sunday,  the 
fifteenth  of  November,  anniversary  of  the  day  on  which  the  republic 
was  declared.  In  Brazil  this  ceremony  is  as  simple  as  the  swearing 
in  of  a  juror.  The  incoming  president  takes  the  oath  privately,  signs 
his  name,  bids  farewell  to  his  predecessor,  and  the  thing  is  done.  On 
this  occasion  things  moved  even  more  swiftly.  The  instant  the  other 
had  taken  his  place,  "Dudii"  sprang  into  an  automobile,  even  forgetting 
in  his  haste  to  embrace  the  new  president,  according  to  time-honored 
Brazilian  custom— of  thirty  years'  standing— and  fled  to  the  protection 
of  Petropolis  and  his  youthful  consort.  He  had  good  precedent  for 
his  eagerness;  other  retiring  presidents  of  Brazil  have  done  likewise. 
When  Campos  Salles  left  the  presidency  in  1902  he  was  stoned  by 
the  populace,  yet  all  Brazilians  agree  that  he  was  by  no  means  as 
corrupt  or  poor  a  president  as  the  "unpleasant  mediocrity"  who  was 
just  then  fleeing. 

It  quickly  began  to  be  apparent,  however,  that  perhaps  "these 
terrible  four  years  of  darkness"  were  not  entirely  ended.  The  new 
president  was  considered  an  honest  and,  within  Brazilian  limits,  a 
democratic  man,  but  he  was  evidently  not  quite  strong  enough  to  throw 
oft"  the  domination  of  the  national  boss,  the  "odious  gaucho"  senator 
from  Rio  Grande  do  Sul.  It  was  partly  due  to  this  feeling  of  dis- 
appointment, partly  to  the  increased  wrath  caused  by  publication  of 
censored  articles  left  over  from  "Dudii's"  reign,  reciting  unbelievable 
official  thievery  and  corruption,  and  to  the  release  of  great  bands  of 
political  prisoners  from  dungeons  in  the  islands  of  the  bay,  where 
they  had  been  sent  without  trial  or  even  accusation,  that  serious  riots 
again  broke  out  soon  after  my  return  to  the  capital.  This  time  the 
fuss  was  started  by  students  from  the  schools  of  medicine,  law.  and 


3o8  W'ORKING  NORTH  FROIM  PATAGONIA 

the  like,  who  decided  to  "bury"  the  ex-president.  Something  like 
burning  in  effigy,  this  was  considered  a  great  insult  not  only  to  the 
former  executive  in  person  but  to  the  army  which  he,  as  a  field 
marshal,  represented.  The  army  general  in  command  of  the  police 
brigade  of  the  federal  district  went  out  to  stop  the  outrage.  The 
students  were  already  parading  the  streets  with  a  gaudily  gilded  "coffin" 
and  using  the  offensive  nicknames  of  "Dudu"  and  "Rainha  Mae,"  when 
the  brigade  was  set  in  motion.  Before  it  could  accomplish  its  purpose, 
orders  came  from  the  newly  appointed  minister  of  justice  to  let  the 
students  go  on  with  their  hrincadcira  (child's  play),  whereupon  the 
general  in  command  '■ode  back  to  the  ministry  and  resigned — knowing 
he  was  to  be  dismissed  next  day  anyway.  Meanwhile  the  students 
had  been  joined  by  an  immense  mob  of  popularcs,  mainly  barefooted 
out-of-works  and  men  of  the  porter,  street-sweeper  and  hawker  type, 
who  marched  back  and  forth  through  the  business  section  and  at 
length  broke  out  in  attacks  on  "Dudu"  sympathizers  or  beneficiaries, 
which  resulted  in  several  deaths.  When  night  fell  a  regiment  of 
cavalry,  another  of  infantry,  and  all  the  police  of  the  federal  district 
were  protecting  the  palace  of  Cattete  and  that  of  Gaunabara,  in  which 
the  new  president  had  chosen  to  make  his  home.  Nictheroy,  across 
the  bay,  also  was  seething;  even  Sao  Paulo  threatened  to  join  the 
revolt,  to  avenge  the  insult  of  having  been  offered  the  most  unim- 
portant post  in  the  cabinet,  with  oily  words  about  being  the  "agricultural 
state  par  excellence."  But  the  new  government,  like  the  old,  had  too 
firm  an  ally  in  the  army  for  a  revolution,  with  no  other  support  than 
the  weaponless  popularcs,  to  be  successful.  Gradually  the  rioting  died 
away,  though  by  no  means  the  criticism  of  the  new  administration, 
and  Brazil  settled  down  to  another  four  years  not  unlike  those  that 
had  just  been  so  fittingly  brought  to  a  close,  but  which  were  to  be 
marked  a  fev/  months  later  by  the  assassination  of  the  "odious  gaucho." 
Though  they  were  empty,  I  did  not  feel  like  again  taking  our  old 
rooms  out  on  the  Praia  do  Flamengo.  They  seemed  hot  and  stuffy; 
the  very  waters  of  the  bay  felt  tepid ;  even  the  president's  palace  of 
Cattete  next  door  had  been  abandoned  in  favor  of  the  newer  and  more 
sumptuous  one  of  Guanabara.  I  hunted  Leme  and  Copacabana  over 
in  vain  for  quarters  overlooking  one  of  those  peerless  beaches  where 
the  air  from  the  open  ocean  might  make  life  endurable,  but  the  houses 
along  the  shore  belong  to  the  well-to-do,  who  do  not  have  to  take 
roomers  even  in  "brutal  hard  times."  During  my  search  I  accidentally 
dropped  into  the  Cinema  Copacabana,  a  pleasant  little  place  in  one 


ADVENTURES  OF  AN  ADVANCE  AGENT     309 

of  the  most  prosperous  sections  of  town.  The  slow-witted  Portuguese 
who  announced  himself  the  owner  and  manager  soon  proved  to  be 
merely  the  hen-pecked  consort  of  the  real  director.  But  the  place 
promised  well,  if  properly  managed,  and  I  finally  signed  it  for  five  days 
■ — and  fled  to  Petropolis  for  Thanksgiving. 

Out  at  the  Praia  Formosa — which  is  no  more  a  beach  than  it  is 
beautiful — I  found  a  mob  of  drenched  and  wilted  people  fighting  about 
a  tiny,  discolored  hole  in  the  station  wall,  of  the  height  of  tlie 
average  man's  knees,  for  the  privilege  of  buying  tickets  to  the  "summer 
capital."  For  though  there  were  many  daily  trains,  even  when  train 
schedules  were  being  reduced  all  over  Brazil  because  of  the  war- 
created  difficulty  of  importing  coal,  there  were  thousands  of  regular 
commuters  and  few  places  left  for  the  poorer  Cariocas  who  scraped 
together  enough  for  a  round-trip  ticket  or  two  during  the  season. 
Most  of  the  commuters  had  their  permanent  seats,  with  their  names 
and  their  business  or  rank  posted  on  the  backs  of  them,  and  the  mere 
traveler  had  to  wander  through  several  cars  before  he  could  find  a 
place,  like  a  stranger  seeking  a  pew  in  a  fashionable  church. 

The  Leopoldina  Railway  between  Rio  and  Petropolis  is  the  oldest 
in  Brazil,  having  been  opened  to  the  foot  of  the  range  in  1854  so 
that  Emperor  Pedro  II  could  flee  from  hot  weather  and  yellow  fever 
in  the  summer  months.  We  raced  without  interruption  across  a  low, 
jungled  plain  until  the  mountains  grew  up  impa.ssable  above  us. 
Formerly  this  region  was  well  cultivated,  but  man  was  unequal  to 
the  grim  struggle  with  nature,  especially  after  the  emancipation  of  the 
only  race  that  could  cope  with  the  swampy,  matted  jungle,  and  to-day 
the  ruins  of  many  a  plantation  house  lie  buried  beneath  the  invading 
l)ush,  while  the  few  hovels  with  their  little  fenced  gardens  look  like 
islands  in  the  tangled  wilderness.  Yet  we  sped  through  many  suburban 
villages  shaded  with  palm-trees  and  adorned  with  immense  tumbled 
rocks.  On  top  of  one  of  these,  high  above  the  surrounding  landscape, 
sat  the  two-spired  church  of  Penha,  a  famous  place  of  pilgrimage. 
A  few  peasants  were  plowing  and  loading  cut  grass  upon  carts  drawn 
by  zebu-sired  oxen.  Puffs  of  white  clouds,  like  exploded  shells,  hung 
here  and  there  above  the  brilliant  horizon.  The  three-cows  advertise- 
ment of  a  well-known  malted  milk  company  suddenly  loomed  up  against 
the  background  of  jungle,  its  Portuguese  words  making  it  doubly 
fantastic  in  this  exotic  setting.  Here  and  there  we  passed  section 
gangs  poling  themselves  homeward  in  their  unpumpable  hand-cars  with 
long  bamboo  staffs,  like  Dutch  canal  boats. 


310  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

The  first-class  seats,  cane-covered  in  respect  for  the  climate,  were 
divided  by  an  extra  arm  in  the  middle,  obviating  personal  contact,  which 
is  the  way  train  seats  should  be,  no  matter  what  fat  men  or  honey- 
mooning couples  may  prefer.  Many  of  my  fellow-travelers  were  as 
much  worth  watching  as  the  scenes  along  the  way.  Here  a  man  as 
black  as  a  beachcomber's  hopes  of  signing  on  in  Singapore  leaned  back 
in  pompous  full-dress  in  his  placarded  seat,  acting  like  the  millionaire 
president  of  some  great  corporation  as  he  pored  over  the  contents  of 
his  elaborate  leather  portfolio.  I  would  have  given  the  price  of  a 
Brazilian  meal  to  have  seen  the  couple  across  the  aisle  from  me 
suddenly  transported  to  one  of  our  "J^"^  Crow"  states.  He  was  a 
self-important  mountain  of  a  man,  as  white  as  you  or  I ;  she,  just 
as  self-important,  dressed  in  rich  plumes  and  Paris  fashions,  hideous 
with  diamonds  and  other  glittering  pebbles,  was  about  one-third  negro. 
One  poor  woman  farther  on  had  only  ten  fingers,  two  ears,  and  as 
many  wrists — her  skirts  covered  her  ankles,  strangely  enough — on 
which  to  wear  her  jewelry,  though  she  had  made  the  most  of  her 
meager  opportunities  by  putting  three  or  four  rings  on  each  finger. 
Still  farther  along  an  old  woman  in  mourning  had  bits  of  black  cloth 
sewed  over  her  earrings.  A  nice  jet  nose  ring  about  two  inches  in 
diameter  would  have  been  so  much  more  original,  and  as  becoming, 
and  would  have  made  conspicuous  one's  poignant  grief  even  to  those 
who  might  miss  so  commonplace  an  adornment  as  earrings. 

There  came  a  stretch  of  swamp  and  uninhabited  lowland,  thick  with 
bulrushes,  then  heavily  wooded  hills  grew  up  before  us  and  we 
came  to  a  halt  at  the  edge  of  the  plain.  A  little  engine,  built  like  a 
kangaroo,  took  charge  of  two  of  our  cars  and  shoved  them  up  the 
steep  mountainside  on  a  rackrail  track.  Now  we  were  buried  in 
narrow  cuttings,  now  gazing  upon  magnificent  panoramas  that  opened 
out  through  dense  woods.  There  overhung  the  line  many  tremendous 
boulders,  on  one  of  which,  large  as  a  house,  some  wag  had  written 
in  red  paint,  "Va  com  esta"  (Take  this  along  with  you).  The  vege- 
tation presently  became  sodden  wet;  the  incessant  singing  of  the 
jungle,  scarcely  noticed  until  it  stopped,  died  away  and  vast  views 
opened  out  on  what  we  had  left  behind.  Flooded  with  the  rays  of  a 
full  moon,  the  far-off  range  of  mountains  cut  a  jagged  line  across  the 
sky.  It  grew  cooler  every  minute ;  the  air  became  clearer,  and  as  the 
oppression  of  wilting  heat  wore  away  a  drowsiness  came  upon  us. 
At  Alto  da  Serra,  some  2500  feet  above  but  barely  a  mile  farther  on 


ADVENTURES  OF  AN  ADVANCE  AGENT     311 

than  the  station  at  the  foot  of  the  range,  civilization  began  again,  with 
all  its  pleasant  and  unpleasant  concomitants. 

Petropolis,  fashionable  resort  of  the  wealthy  Cariocas,  national 
legislators  and  foreign  diplomats,  lies  snugly  ensconced  among  the  cool 
hills,  a  charming  assemblage  of  villas  jjcering  forth  from  tropical 
gardens.  The  former  emperor  for  which  it  is  named  made  the  town 
to  order  by  importing  three  thousand  German  and  Swiss  settlers  in 
1845,  as  examples  of  cleanliness  and  industry  to  his  own  peoi)le. 
Formerly  tiie  entire  government  came  here  during  the  summer  months, 
but  when  the  mosquito  and  his  playmate,  yellow  fever,  were  routed, 
most  of  the  native  officials  went  back  to  the  city,  though  the  diplomats 
remain,  pleasantly  cut  off  from  the  rough  world  of  practical  politics, 
which  seems  far  away  indeed,  instead  of  merely  an  hour  and  a  half 
distant  by  Brazil's  best  train  service.  There  is  a  suggestion  of  a 
German  watering-place  about  Petropolis,  with  its  bizarre  little  resi- 
dences, its  trim  streets  lined  by  bamboo  hedges,  its  roses,  hydrangeas 
and  honeysuckle,  its  "kiss-flowers"  gathering  honey  from  the  fuchia- 
trees.  The  Teutonic  type  has  persisted  in  spite  of  interbreeding  and 
comparative  isolation  from  the  fatherland  in  a  strong  Brazilian  environ- 
ment, and  up  to  the  beginning  of  the  war  there  were  still  German 
schools  in  Petropolis.  A  spotless  room  in  one  of  its  quiet  summer 
hostelries  is  a  relief  after  months  of  Brazilian  hotel  squalor  and  uproar ; 
or,  if  one's  income  is  limited,  there  are  cheap  and  pleasant  rooms  to 
be  had  with  the  German  inn-keepers. 

But  Petropolis  is  tropical  enough  to  be  unpleasantly  warm  on  a 
summer  noonday,  and  among  her  honeysuckle  are  horrid  hairy  spiders 
as  large  as  belt-buckles,  with  perhaps  a  deadly  bite.  Like  Rio,  the  town 
spreads  up  many  narrowing  valleys,  fresh  green  Cascatinha  with  its 
weaving-mill  beside  a  rivulet  sliding  down  a  sloping  rock  and  breaking 
in  little  cascades  at  the  bottom,  or  the  restful  tree-lined  banks  of  canals 
meandering  away  through  the  wooded  hills.  Through  the  gap  by 
which  the  railway  creeps  up  to  the  plateau  may  be  dimly  made  out  all 
the  Carioca  range  and,  faintly,  the  well-known  form  of  the  Pao 
d'Assucar.  There  is  a  vast  panorama  of  Guanabara  Bay  and  all  its 
islands,  but  Rio  is  only  hazily  suggested,  and  nearer  views  of  it  are 
much  more  striking.  Another  world  on  quite  another  plane  spreads 
out  below,  careless,  happy-go-lucky  negro  huts  straggling  up  the  wooded 
valleys  as  high  as  they  can  easily  climb,  the  soothing  sound  of  mountain 
brooks,  playfully  taking  little  rocky  tuml)les  here  and  there  without 
much  hurt,  joining  the  birds  in  making  a  kind  of  sylvan  music. 


312  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Pedro  II  still  sits  out  here  in  a  little  palm-topped  square  under  the 
filtered  sunlight  or  the  summer  moon,  his  book  closed  over  a  finger, 
the  tails  of  his  Prince  Albert  falling  on  either  side  of  his  armchair,- 
his  congress  gaiters  fitting  the  ease  of  his  posture,  gazing  benignly  forth 
from  his  great  black  shovel  beard  with  the  studious,  half-dreamy  look 
of  the  man  who  hated  action.  He  is  by  no  means  our  preconceived 
notion  of  an  emperor,  but  a  dreamy,  easy-going,  democratic  aristocrat 
who  seems  eminently  in  his  place  here  in  this  quiet  village  far  from 
the  rumble  of  the  world  and  the  heat  and  labors  of  the  day  below. 
Small  wonder  he  was  the  last  emperor  of  this  turbulent,  pushing 
western  hemisphere.  "A  great  Brazilian,"  they  had  called  him  in 
celebrating  his  birthday  a  few  days  before,  "who  gave  happiness  to  his 
people  during  almost  half  a  century." 

"Dudu,"  looking  most  comfortable  and  contented  with  life,  was 
driving  about  the  quiet  streets  of  Petropolis  with  his  girl  wife  behind 
a  pair  of  prancing  iron-gray  horses  and  a  liveried  driver  frozen  in 
stone.  As  in  all  towns  where  kings  and  presidents  are  regular  resi- 
dents, no  one  paid  him  the  slightest  attention,  though  the  same  pair 
would  no  doubt  at  that  moment  have  brought  the  business,  and  perhaps 
the  peace,  of  Rio  to  a  standstill. 

There  was  a  nice  little  up-to-date  cinema  just  outside  my  window 
that  would  have  been  an  ideal  place  for  us  to  have  made  several  hun- 
dred dollars — if  only  we  had  come  to  Brazil  when  the  world  was  still 
going  round.  For  the  moment  it  was  inhabited  by  a  Portuguese  barn- 
storming company,  and  the  manager  had  not  only  lost  heart  over 
the  "brutal  crisis,"  but  had  so  extraordinarily  good  an  opinion  of  him- 
self and  his  establishment  that  nothing  would  induce  him  to  offer  us 
more  than  forty  per  cent.  I  would  not  have  made  a  contract  at  that 
rate  with  St.  Peter  for  a  series  of  performances  on  the  Golden  Stairs, 
and  as  the  only  other  cinema  in  town  was  small  and  unimportant,  and 
run  by  an  Italian  too  artless  to  do  business  with  to  advantage,  there 
was  nothing  left  but  to  fold  up  my  arguments  and  say  good-day. 

I  came  down  to  Rio  to  see  the  show  come  in,  but  got  a  scare  instead, 
for  it  did  not  appear,  and  we  were  due  to  open  in  Copacabana  the 
following  night.  They  turned  up  that  evening,  however,  with  a  tale 
to  tell.  When  they  reached  Ouro  Fino  for  the  Saturday  engagement, 
they  found  that  bandits  had  torn  up  the  railway  between  there  and 
Itajuba,  evidently  out  of  spite  against  the  new  president.  "Tut"  had 
been  equal  to  the  occasion,  however,  for  though  they  could  not  fulfill 
the  Itajuba  contract — the  only  one  we  ever  failed  to  carry  out — they 


ADVENTURES  OF  AN  ADVANCE  AGENT     313 

did  not  lose  the  date,  but  played  a  second  time  in  Ouro  Fino  to  a  good 
Sunday  house.  Then  they  had  returned  to  Sao  Paulo,  catching  the 
night  train  and  paying  a  fortune  of  400$  to  get  themselves  and  the 
outfit  back  to  Rio  in  time,  though  nothing  like  what  they  would  have 
had  to  pay  had  not  the  baggage-man  mistaken  them  for  "artists"  and 
the  trunks  for  their  wardrobe  and  stage  costumes.  Otherwise  all  had 
gone  smoothly  with  them,  except  for  one  flattering  error  on  the  part 
of  a  charming  young  society  lady  of  Franca.  That  town  had  been 
placarded,  as  usual,  with  our  large  three-sheet  posters  of  Edison,  and 
it  was  natural  that  "Tut's"  six  feet  and  more  of  height  should  have 
drawn  the  attention  of  the  susceptible  sex  as  he  sauntered  about  the 
streets.  That  evening  the  young  lady  in  question  was  heard  remarking 
to  her  escort,  "Is  n't  it  strange  that  Senhor  Edison  looks  so  old  in  his 
pictures  when  he  is  really  so  young  and  handsome?" 

During  our  stay  in  it,  the  American  flag  was  somewhat  overworked 
in  Copacabana,  there  being  one  over  our  cinema  door  and  another  in 
a  sand  lot  a  block  away  in  which  a  battered  and  paintless  one-ring 
American  circus  had  recently  opened.  Not  often,  I  wager,  have 
American  showmen  directly  competed  so  far  from  home.  We  soon 
made  friends  with  the  animal  trainer,  whose  ten  years  of  knocking 
about  Brazil  had  brought  out  into  sharper  relief  his  native  Iowa  dialect 
and  point  of  view.  Among  his  collection  of  moth-eaten  animals  in 
rusty  old  cages  were  two  of  savage  disposition.  The  hyena  had 
several  times  bitten  him,  but  "Frank,"  the  tiger,  which  sprang  at 
anyone  who  came  within  ten  feet  of  the  cage,  was  the  only  one  really 
to  be  feared. 

"Once,"  said  the  exiled  lowan,  holding  up  the  ring  finger  of  his 
left  hand,  which  was  curled  up  in  a  half-circle,  "I  was  doing  my  act 
at  a  burg  up  in  Minas  when  'Frank'  made  a  swipe  at  me  with  one  paw. 
Lucky  she  did  n't  get  all  her  claws  in,  or  it  would  have  been  good-by 
hand,  but  she  happened  to  get  just  one  claw  into  the  inside  of  this  finger 
at  the  base.  She  pulled,  and  I  was  so  scared  I  guess  I  pulled  too,  and 
she  peeled  the  whole  inside  of  the  finger  off  the  bone — tendons,  nerves, 
veins  and  all.  I  hid  that  hand  behind  me  so  the  audience  could  n't 
see  the  blood,  or  'Frank'  smell  it,  whelted  her  a  few,  and  finished 
the  act.  I  could  n't  go  out,  for  the  animals  would  have  followed  me 
into  the  audience ;  I  had  to  finish  the  act  and  let  them  go  out  the 
regular  way,  like  they  've  been  trained.  Then  I  wrapped  up  my  hand 
in  a  towel  and  hiked  over  to  a  drug  store  and  he  threw  a  whole  bottle 
of  iodine  into  it,  and  then  they  called  in  one  of  these  here  native 


314  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

doctors  and  he  chopped  around  in  it  and  did  it  up  in  pasteboard, 
which  of  course  bent,  so  that  he  had  to  chop  into  it  every  day  or  so 
and  near  killed  me,  and  finally  it  twisted  into  this  shape  and  stayed 
there.  And  that  guy  had  the  nerve  to  charge  me  a  hundred  and  fifty 
mil !  After  the  first  dressing  I  went  over  to  a  bar  and  had  a  whole 
glass  of  rye  whiskey  and  then  about  a  quart  of  this  nigger  rum  they 
call  cachasa  on  top  of  it — but  hell,  I  did  n't  feel  it  any  more  'n  milk,  and 
for  four  nights  I  never  got  a  wink  of  sleep.  I  was  afraid  to  drink 
anything  for  fear  of  making  it  worse,  but  finally  I  says,  *Oh,  to  hell 
with  it !  I  'm  going  to  have  a  sleep,'  and  I  went  out  and  got  drunk-^ 
God,  I  never  got  so  drunk  before  in  my  life!  And  then  I  went  home 
and  slept  a  whole  night  and  a  day.  But  it  sure  does  make  a  man  sick 
at  his  stomach  to  get  caught  by  an  animal." 

"Tut"  and  I  had  taken  a  room — my  seventh  residence  in  Rio — 
out  at  the  end  of  the  tunnel  in  Leme — so  called  because  a  rock  shaped 
Hke  a  leme,  or  rudder,  juts  out  into  the  ocean  at  the  end  of  the  beach. 
By  this  time  Christmas  was  drawing  near  and  shops  were  everywhere 
offering  "brinquedos  a  granel"  (playthings  by  the  bushel),  and  the  rains 
had  come  on  in  earnest.  Rio  was  suffering  so  severely  from  the 
"brutal  crisis"  that  people  in  the  cinema  business  had  lost  their  nerve 
completely,  and  it  began  to  look  as  if  the  show  would  catch  up  with 
me  before  I  could  make  a  new  contract.  For  several  days  I  dashed 
about  in  pouring  rain  before  I  finally  succeeded  in  running  to  earth  in 
the  bosom  of  his  own  family — which  is  very  bad  business  form  in 
Brazil — a  man  with  a  string  of  theaters  in  Rio,  Nictheroy,  and  the 
two  largest  towns  of  Minas  Geraes.  I  quickly  got  his  name  signed 
to  a  sixteen-day  contract  and,  relieved  of  the  fear  of  having  the  show 
run  over  me,  settled  down  to  take  life  easy  again. 


Uuimantina  spilk  down  into  the  stream  in  which  are  founfi  s  ime  of  its  gold  and  diamonds 


A  hydraulic  diamond-cutting  establishment  of  Diamantina 


Z-WV' 


^-^«^MV  if'iA^  .«.'#>..'>#». . 


CHAPTER  XIV 


WANDERING    IN    MINAS    GERAES 


ON  DECEMBER  13TH  our  alarm-clock  having  gone  astray  and 
being  evidently  unreplaceable  in  Brazil,  where  time  means  so 
little,  I  sat  up  all  night  in  order  to  rout  "Tut"  out  at  four  and 
send  him  off  to  the  station,  following  him  next  day  up  on  the  cool 
and  comfortable  plateau  to  the  second  town  of  Minas  Geraes.  Juiz  de 
Fora  lies  in  a  deep  lap  of  wooded  hills,  with  a  conspicuous  monument 
and  statue  of  "Christo  Redemptor"  on  a  little  parked  hilltop  high  above 
yet  close  to  the  city,  and  revealing  its  site  from  afar  off.  Fir  trees, 
masses  of  roses  of  all  colors,  and  other  flora  of  the  temperate  zone  add 
to  stretches  of  densely  green  grass,  so  unlike  the  gravel  or  paved 
squares  almost  universal  in  South  America,  in  making  the  town  a 
pleasant  place  of  sojourn.  The  country  round  about  is  very  rolling 
and  without  a  suggestion  of  the  tropics,  but  its  coffee  is  unfortunately 
small,  poor,  and  ill-tended,  grown  cornpletely  over  in  places  with 
weeds  and  creepers ;  and  as  the  town  depends  almost  entirely  on  this 
product,  it  had  a  squeeze-penny  mood  that  was  not  natural  to  Brazil. 
Like  many  another  Brazilian  town,  its  name  is  of  simple  origin.  A 
juic  de  fora,  or  "outside  judge,"  went  about  the  country  on  a  regular 
circuit  in  colonial  days,  holding  court  in  various  places,  of  which  the 
present  town  was  the  most  distant,  not  from  Rio,  which  had  no 
official  standing  in  the  olden  times,  but  from  the  ancient  capital  of 
Minas  Geraes,  Ouro  Preto. 

It  was  toward  Ouro  Preto  that  I  continued  a  day  or  two  later, 
pausing  in  one  town  to  make  a  contract  with  the  local  saloon-keeper, 
in  another  to  find  a  cinema  about  the  size  of  a  box-car  tight  closed 
and  the  owner  off  traveling;  in  a  third  that  turned  out  to  be  a  mud 
village  without  electricity,  even  had  I  been  willing  to  risk  dragging 
our  outfit  through  the  atrocious  streets  to  its  toy  theater.  It  was 
in  the  last  that  I  boarded  the  northbound  train  an  hour  before  it  arrived, 
which  is  not  what  the  Chileans  call  a  "German  tale,"  but  an  everyday 
fact.  For  there  the  government  railway,  which  comes  that  far  with 
a  gauge  even  wider  than  our  own,  suddenly  changes  to  a  meter  in 

31S 


3i6  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

width,  and  I  had  already  grown  weary  of  sitting  in  the  train  I  was 
waiting  for  when  it  rolled  in  and,  transferring  its  contents  to  its 
narrower  self,  rambled  on  across  the  cool  plateau. 

Besides  our  cloth-mounted  three-sheets,  I  had  had  printed  several 
thousand  posters  and  window-cards,  and  the  towns  of  Brazil  blos- 
somed with  Edison  behind  me.  Then  there  were  great  bundles  of 
avulsos,  or  handbills,  of  many  colors,  to  be  strewn  among  the  eager 
populace  when  the  show  actually  arrived.  Except  for  the  printer's 
errors,  which  were  legion,  these  new  masterly  appeals  were  all  my 
own  handiwork,  as  were  the  articles  on  the  life  of  Edison  which 
sprang  up  in  the  newspapers  along  my  route,  for  I  had  at  last  almost 
tamed  the  misjointed  Portuguese  language.  By  the  time  our  tour  was 
finished  Brazil  would  certainly  have  known  the  story  of  Edison  far 
better  than  he  knows  it  himself,  had  he  not  already  been  the  best- 
known  American  in  South  America — with  the  possible  exception  of 
Franklin,  whom  thousands  took  to  be  his  contemporary,  often  asking 
if  the  two  great  inventors  sometimes  worked  together  and  were  on 
good  terms  socially,  or  whether  they  raged  with  jealousy  over  each 
other's  achievements. 

There  were  many  tunnels  on  the  way  to  Ouro  Preto,  and  much 
winding  among  deep-green  hills,  the  soil  still  reddish,  but  showing 
little  cultivation.  All  this  region  is  at  least  3000  feet  above  sea-level, 
where  corn  feels  more  at  home  than  bananas  or  even  coffee.  Herds 
of  cream-colored  cattle  of  part  zebu  ancestry  roamed  the  broken, 
grassy  countryside.  It  was  a  dull,  showery  day,  and  the  wet  green 
trees  clung  to  the  hillsides  like  the  plumage  of  birds,  while  everywhere 
the  palms  stood  with  disheveled  hair.  We  made  several  stops  on  the 
branch  line  eastward  from  Burnier,  just  why  I  do  not  know,  and  at 
length  halted  at  an  isolated  building  with  the  information  that  we 
had  reached  Ouro  Preto. 

On  the  train  I  had  chanced  to  mention  my  business  to  one  of 
several  local  celebrities  in  heavy  overcoats,  who  quickly  shouted  the 
information  to  all  within  hearing,  so  that  when  I  disembarked  the 
negro  hotel  runners  were  already  calling  me  "Doctor  Franck."  One 
of  them  piled  my  baggage  on  his  head  and  we  set  out  on  foot  into 
the  night,  for  Ouro  Preto,  I  quickly  discovered,  is  so  steep  that 
vehicles  have  never  become  acclimated  there.  As  we  panted  upward 
past  great  sheer-cut  bluffs,  scattered  lights  gradually  disclosed  the 
town,  piled  and  tumbled  far  above  and  below  us,  the  round  cobble- 
stones of  its  precipitous  streets  worn  so  icy  smooth  by  many  genera- 


WANDERING  IN  MINAS  GERAES  317 

tions  of  bare  and  shod  feet  that  my  own  showed  a  continuous  desire 
to  lag  behind  me.  In  a  hotel  as  old  as  Vasco  da  Gama,  and  about 
as  dilapidated,  I  was  shown  with  ceremonial  courtesy  into  an  enor- 
mous front  room  with  a  "matrimonial"  bed  wider  than  the  street 
outside,  the  springs  of  which  I  quickly  discovered  to  be  solid  planks. 
Recalling  my  courteous  colored  companion,  I  gave  him  five  minutes 
in  which  to  find  me  a  real  bed.  We  wandered  much  longer  than  that 
through  a  labyrinth  of  rooms  and  anterooms — the  latter  all  with 
narrow  bedsteads,  suggesting  the  old  slave  days  when  each  traveler 
brought  with  him  a  servant  to  sleep  outside  his  door — before  we 
found  a  cama  de  arame,  or  "bed  of  wire,"  in  another  vast  chamber, 
with  a  window  looking  out  across  what  seemed  to  be  a  bottomless 
gorge  to  patches  of  small,  window-shaped  lights  climbing  high  into 
the  sky. 

I  went  out  for  a  stroll,  climbing  cobbled  streets  so  sheer  that  a 
foot-slip  would  have  landed  me  in  quite  another  pia,rt  of  town, 
passing  buildings  so  old  and  quaint  and  medieval  that  in  spite  of 
the  modern  lights  Edison  has  bequeathed  the  place  I  expected  some 
old  Portuguese  viceroy  in  his  cloak  and  sword  and  plumed  hat  to 
step  out  of  any  dark  passageway  followed  by  his  slaves  and  re- 
tainers and  preceded  by  his  link-boys.  I  had  all  but  forgotten  the 
"feel"  of  old  South  American  mountain  towns,  with  their  something 
peculiarily  their  own,  and  could  easily  have  fancied  myself  back  in  the 
Andes  again.  Indeed,  I  was  only  beginning  to  realize  the  charm  of 
those  old  Andean  pueblos,  barely  guessed  when  one  is  physically  lost 
in  their  squalor,  yet  fascinating  from  a  distance  of  time  and  space, 
every  twist  and  turn  and  descent  and  rise  of  their  streets  a  lurking 
mystery,  like  a  winding  mountain  road,  cool  and  silent — especially 
silent,  in  the  absence  of  all  wheeled  traffic. 

Ouro  Preto  means  "black  gold."  The  hills  and  young  mountains 
lying  in  tumbled  heaps  about  the  town  are  honeycombed  with  aban- 
doned mines,  as  the  town  itself  is  said  to  be  with  secret  subterranean 
passageways.  Not  even  Ayacucho  in  the  Andes  is  so  overrun  with 
churches.  Only  an  accurate  man  could  throw  a  stone  without  hitting 
one,  most  of  them  of  light  colored  rock,  beautified  with  age,  bulking 
far  above  the  few  little  old  houses  apportioned  to  each,  both  by  their 
size  and  by  their  places  of  vantage  on  some  eminence  or  mountain 
nose.  Evidently  whenever  they  killed  a  slave  or  committed  some 
particularly  dastardly  crime  the  old  Portuguese  adventurers  salved 
their  consciences  or  quieted  their  superstitions  by  building  a  church. 


3i8  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Between  them  the  little  old  houses  straggle  in  double  rows  far  up 
every  steep  valley  that  has  room  for  them,  here  connected  by  very 
old  stone  bridges  over  narrow,  yet  deep,  gorge  streams,  with  time- 
crumbled  stone  benches  along  them,  there  refusing  to  follow  when 
the  cobbled  street  suddenly  lets  go  and  falls  headlong  with  many  a 
racking  twist  into  another  abyss. 

In  general,  the  old  capital  of  the  mining  province  is  built  along 
both  sides  of  a  small  swift  stream,  which  spills  down  through  town 
with  a  musical  sound,  picking  up  some  of  its  garbage  on  the  way. 
Old  colonial  ruins,  built  in  the  leisurely,  plentiful,  massive  fashioff 
of  long  ago,  still  bear  coats-of-arms  and  cut-stone  Portuguese  em- 
blems, some  half-hidden  behind  masses  of  white  roses  or  climbing 
flowers.  Old  fountains  of  variegated  colors,  very  broken,  much 
weather-  and  time-faded,  still  have  tiny  streams  trickling  forth 
from  the  stone  mouths  of  human  heads  or  strange  creatures  unknown 
to  natural  history;  scores  of  quaint  old  balconies,  mysterious  corners, 
and  queer  porticos  jut  out  over  streets  or  abysses.  There  was 
evidently  no  building  plan  except  that  imposed  by  nature.  Each 
householder  built  on  his  few  feet  of  space  at  any  height  and  slope 
he  chose,  so  that  although  the  buildings  nearly  all  cling  close  together 
for  mutual  support,  they  present  most  fantastic  combinations,  each 
with  its  red-tile  roof  faded  from  bright  to  drab  according  to  its  age 
and  situation. 

In  the  main  praga  up  at  the  top  of  the  town,  which  is  rectangular 
and  square-cobbled  and  singularly  quiet,  is  a  statue  of  "Tiradentes" 
high  up  on  a  slim  granite  pedestal,  his  hair  wild,  his  shirt  open,  his 
wrists  weighted  down  with  chains.  This  nickname  of  "Pull  Teeth" 
was  given  a  sergeant  who,  way  back  in  1792,  started  the  first  revolu- 
tion for  Brazilian  independence,  but  who  was  captured,  executed, 
and  his  head  hung  up  in  an  iron  cage  in  this  same  praga.  There  is 
a  School  of  Mines,  the  principal  if  not  the  only  one  in  Brazil,  in  an 
old  viceregal  palace  that  was  later  the  seat  of  the  state  government 
until  that  honor  was  taken  away  from  Ouro  Preto.  The  Indians  of 
Minas  could  not  or  would  not  be  enslaved,  and  the  workmen  required 
in  the  mines  were  brought  from  Africa  early  and  often.  I  do  not 
recall  a  mountain  town  anywhere  with  so  large  a  percentage  of 
African  blood,  though  it  is  not  now,  of  course,  pure  African,  for  the 
old  Portuguese  settlers  were  not  slow  to  dilute  it  with  their  own, 
and  with  the  exception  of  a  very  few  of  the  proud  old  families  of 
Minas,  who  have  overridden  their  environment  and  kept  their  veins 


WANDERING  IN  MINAS  GERAES  319 

free  from  the  taint  of  slaves,  there  are  not  many  of  full  white  race. 
In  the  morning  the  inhabitants  straggle  home  from  the  outdoor 
butcher-shop,  carrying  strips  of  raw  meat  by  a  grass  string  run 
through  them;  in  the  later  afternoon  the  frequent  clash  of  jogging 
horse-shoes  on  the  irregular  cobblestones  calls  attention  to  some 
young  blood  come  prancing  by  the  window  of  his  desire,  peering  out 
from  her  window-ledge  over  the  otherwise  silent  and  almost  deserted 
street. 

As  to  my  own  job,  I  did  not  even  have  to  go  out  to  look  for 
contracts,  for  as  I  sat  reading  the  newspapers  and  recovering  from  a 
Brazilian  lunch,  there  came  slinking  in  upon  me  the  local  pharmacist 
and  owner  of  the  "Cinema  Brazil."  He  had  heard  that  I  had  come, 
and  why,  and  as  he  was  eager  to  outdo  his  one  rival  in  town,  he — 
ah — er — he,  too,  had  come.  If  we  played  in  Ouro  Preto  it  meant  four 
important  days — Christmas,  followed  by  a  Saturday  and  Sunday,  and 
a  Monday  also,  for  the  trains  did  not  run  on  that  day.  The  only 
entertainment  in  town,  my  visitor  rambled  on,  in  his  eagerness  to 
attract  us,  was  that  provided  by  two  old  Italian  "women  of  the  Hfe," 
who  offered  a  song  and  dance  nightly  at  the  other  cinema.  At  a 
town  eight  kilometers  away  there  were  many  "Englishmen"  employed 
in  the  gold  mines,  who  would  be  delighted  to  come  in  and  see  their 
fellow-countryman  Edison — what,  he  was  not  coming  himself? — 
well  then,  his  invention.  No  doubt  Senhor  Edison  did  not  think  poor 
old  Ouro  Preto  worth  visiting,  now  that  it  was  no  longer  the  capital, 
but  it  had  many  wonders  even  for  a  great  inventor,  if  one  really 
knew  where  to  look  for  them.  By  this  time  I  had  handed  him  our 
printed  contract,  through  which  he  carefully  spelled  his  way,  while 
I  read  several  columns  of  newspaper.  Then  he  brought  me  back 
to  Brazil  with,  "Ah  yes,  very  good,  only — er — sixty  per  cent,   is  a 

very  large  percentage  and "     At   which  point   I   broke   in  with 

"Why,  I  ought  to  charge  you  eighty  per  cent,  for  being  way  off  here 
on  a  branch  line,  in  a  town  without  even  wheeled  vehicles  \"  Where- 
upon he  shuddered  and  begged  me  to  figure  to  myself  that  he  had 
not  said  a  word  and,  reaching  for  the  contract,  he  signed  it  on  the 
dotted  line. 

Rain  was  pouring  and  the  night  was  still  black  when  I  followed 
my  baggage  down  the  steep  cobbled  road  to  the  station.  There  I 
discovered,  in  a  sudden  flash  of  genius,  why  all  Brazilian  trains  start 
at  daylight  and  stop  at  dark;  it  is  not  because  they  are  afraid  to  go 
home  in  the  dark,  but  so  that  the  languid  employees  will  not  have  to 


320  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

light  the  car-lamps.  Even  the  government  night  expresses  rarely 
have  more  than  a  firefly  of  a  gas-lamp  or  a  couple  of  flickering  oil- 
wicks  in  the  end  of  each  coach.  Brazilians  are  not  a  nation  of 
readers,  and  do  not  demand  decent  lights,  though  there  is  nothing 
to  prove  they  would  get  them  if  they  did.  The  print-loving  stranger 
is  often  warned  that  it  is  dangerous  to  the  health  to  read  during, 
or  just  before,  or  until  long  after  meals,  which  may  be  true,  but 
the  Brazilians  themselves  are  living  proof  that  it  is  still  worse 
never  to  read  at  all.  In  most  stations  there  are  waiting-rooms  only 
for  women,  and  not  a  spot  for  the  mere  male  to  sit  on  unless  he 
boards  the  train  itself,  which  is  also  the  favorite  lounging-place  of 
scores  of  the  local  population  who  have  no  intention  of  traveling 
on  it.  Here  an  affectionate  crowd  was  embracing  and  fondling  one 
another  after  the  Brazilian  fashion  and  giradually  filling  a  tightly 
closed  car  in  which  it  was  not  easy  to  breathe.  It  is  really  foolish, 
too,  to  ride  first-class  on  the  trains  of  the  interior,  for  it  means  little 
more  than  paying  double  price,  when  the  single  is  bad  enough,  for 
the  privilege  of  sitting  in  a  cane  seat  at  one  end  of  a  car,  instead 
of  in  a  wooden  one  at  the  other.  However,  a  few  kind  words  may 
unhesitatingly  be  said  for  the  railways  of  Brazil,  One  may  leave 
all  he  possesses  in  a  train  seat  and  not  only  will  no  one  touch  it,  but 
his  fellow-travelers  will  stand  for  hours  rather  than  disturb  the 
smallest  parcel  left  to  hold  a  place.  Nor  is  the  baggage-smasher  in- 
digenous to  Brazil.  Several  pieces  of  our  outfit  were  delicate,  yet 
during  a  year's  travel  by  every  known  means  of  conveyance  except 
aeroplane  through  nearly  every  state  of  Brazil,  it  was  never  seriously 
injured — though  on  its  return  to  my  beloved  native  land  it  was 
badly  damaged  between  New  York  and  the  Edison  factory,  an  hour 
away. 

Beyond  the  old  town  of  Sahara,  where  the  first  of  the  gold  that 
was  to  make  Minas  Geraes  famous  and  Portugal  wealthy  was  dis- 
covered in  1698,  we  turned  westward  and  a  few  moments  later  sighted 
through  bedraggled  palm-trees  the  glaring  new  town  of  Bello  Hori- 
zonte.  No  doubt  it  was  to  escape  the  labor  of  propelling  themselves 
about  the  precipitous  streets  of  Ouro  Preto  that  led  the  calfless  legis- 
lators of  Minas  Geraes  to  dethrone  the  time-honored  old  capital  at 
the  beginning  of  the  present  century  and  move  the  government  to  a 
hitherto  uninhabited  spot,  justly  called  "Beautiful  Horizon."  The  site 
chosen  on  which  to  build  to  order  this  new  capital  is  a  broad  shallow 
lap  of  rolling  country,  a  bare,  treeless  landscape  which  abets  the  light- 


WANDERING  IN  MINAS  GERAES  321 

colored  new  buildings  in  producing  a  constant  uncomfortable  glare. 
It  is  strange  that  they  did  not  choose  a  place  with  water,  a  lake  or  at 
least  a  river,  which  may  be  found  even  in  the  lofty  State  of  Minas. 
As  it  is,  there  is  only  an  insignilicant  creek  creeping  tlirough  town 
and  an  artificial  pond  in  tlie  center  of  an  unfinished  park  in  which 
the  water  is  so  red  that  even  the  swans  paddling  disconsolately  about 
in  it  have  a  reddish  hue.  The  designers  have  all  the  details  of  a 
complete  city  in  mind;  the  difficulty  is  to  carry  out  their  well  laid 
plans  and  produce  one.  For  Bello  Horizonte  is  visible  proof  that  it 
takes  more  than  houses,  streets,  and  inhabitants  to  make  a  city.  Its 
public  buildings  are  large  and  plentiful.  Whitewashed  houses  with 
bright  new  red-tile  roofs  lie  scattered  far  and  wide  over  the  rolling 
landscape.  Wide  park  streets  with  electric  tramways  stretch  out  in 
every  direction  in  a  wheel-shaped  system  evidently  copied  from 
Washington.  But  the  broad  avenues  are  still  unpaved,  unpacked 
stretches  of  red  mud,  resembling  newly  plowed  potato  patches,  and 
one  soon  recognizes  that  they  run  nowhere,  that  they  are  an  exotic, 
forced  growth  which  men  are  still  chopping  farther  back  into  the 
red  flesh  of  the  virgin,  scrub-grown  hills.  A  few  have  stretches  of 
broad  cement  sidewalks  lined  with  trees,  but  they  are  trees  still  in 
their  swaddling  clothes  of  protecting  frames,  or  at  best  are  half-growr: 
and  unfamiliar  with  their  duty  of  giving  shade  and  beauty  and  rest- 
fulness.  Such  grass  as  exists  grows  in  scattered  tufts  over  bare  earth, 
in  no  way  resembling  sod.  Though  the  houses  are  new,  many  of  them 
are  set  in  the  beginnings  of  walled  bush  and  flower  gardens,  with 
steep  outside  stairways  leading  to  the  real  residence  in  the  second 
story  and  having  fanciful  paintings  of  such  scenes  as  Rio's  Beira 
Mar  on  the  walls  under  the  porches.  They  have  an  alien,  unsatis- 
fying appearance  which  suggests  that  it  is  better  to  let  even  towns 
grow  up  of  themselves  than  to  force  them  by  hothouse  methods. 
There  are,  of  course,  some  advantages  in  a  city,  especially  in  a  capital, 
built  to  order,  but  though  modernity's  gain  over  medievalism  is  in 
some  ways  shown,  Bello  Horizonte  lacks  not  only  the  charm  of  old 
Ouro  Preto  but  even  the  air  and  spirit  of  a  city.  The  whole  place 
feels  like  a  house  one  has  moved  into  while  it  is  still  building  over 
his  head. 

While  they  were  about  it,  one  wonders  they  did  not  build  in 
stone,  instead  of  adobe  bricks  and  plaster.  The  impression  that 
everything  is  built  only  for  a  temporary  halt,  by  people  who,  like 
Arabian   nomads,  expect  to  move  on  again  to-morrow,  pervades  all 


322  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

modern  America,  in  sharp  contrast  to  Europe  and  the  ancient  Ameri- 
can Indian  civiHzations.  But  at  least  there  are  as  yet  no  slums, 
unless  one  counts  as  such  the  large  clusters  of  small  new  houses  that 
were  almost  huts  scattered  through  the  several  shallow  valleys  spread- 
ing out  from  the  town.  It  is  curious  how  a  city  draws  houses 
about  it  like  a  magnet  even  when  there  seems  to  be  nothing  for  the 
inhabitants  to  do  but  take  in  one  another's  washing — or  do  one  an- 
other's governing.  Though  it  offers  free  sites  to  any  industry  that 
will  establish  itself  there,  only  the  scream  of  a  single  small  weaving 
mill  is  heard  in  Bello  Horizonte.  The  city  produces  nothing  except 
government  for  the  state,  and  the  man  who  comes  into  personal  con- 
tact with  that  soon  realizes  that  it  "costs  expensive"  and  is  none  too 
good  governing  at  that.  More  fuss  is  made  over  the  state  president 
than  over  our  own  national  executive.  Negro  soldiers  in  khaki  and 
bright  red  caps  guard  his  "palace"  and  great  high-walled  garden, 
parading  back  and  forth  day  and  night  before  all  government  build- 
ings with  fixed  bayonets,  not  because  there  is  any  real  danger — except 
to  the  unwary  pedestrian  who  might  run  into  the  pointed  blade  of 
some  sleepy  guard — but  because  all  Latin-America  loves  to  make  a 
show  of  deadly  weapons  even  in  time  of  peace.  The  population  had 
the  bland,  sophisticated  air  of  people  already  trained  to  city  life  else- 
where, like  transplanted  flora  from  other  gardens  of  varied  kind 
and  situation.  Strangers  attract  far  less  attention  than  in  even  larger 
interior  towns,  because  here  all  are  more  or  less  strangers  and  the 
inhabitants  have  not  lived  long  enough  together  to  form  that  sort  of 
closed  corporation  of  old  established  towns,  which  not  only  makes  a 
new  and  unfamiliar  face  an  object  of  curiosity,  but  arouses  a  kind 
of   distrust  and   annoyance  among   the   native   inhabitants. 

The  show  reached  Bello  Horizonte  before  me  and  had  done  a 
good  Saturday  and  Sunday  business,  but  "Tut"  reported  that  all 
records  for  "deadheads"  were  being  broken.  The  manager  was  a 
bullet-headed  mulatto — whose  name,  by  the  way,  was  Americo  Ves- 
puccio — and  who  did  not  have  the  moral  courage  needed  to  cope  with 
the  swarms  of  official  beggars  which  infest  a  state  capital.  When 
the  doors  opened  on  Monday  night  I  was  lolling  incognito  nearby. 
The  ticket-taker  was  a  mulatto  girl  of  about  fourteen  who  thrust  out 
her  hand  whenever  anyone  walked  in,  taking  the  ticket  if  there  hap- 
pened to  be  one  to  take,  but  paying  no  attention  to  the  fact  that  as 
often  as  not  there  was  none.  Not  only  were  there  many  people  with 
monthly  passes  and  permanent  free  tickets,  but  the  negro  manage- 


WANDERING  IN  MINAS  GERAES  323 

merit,  being  afraid  of  anyone  with  authority,  real  or  pretended,  had 
given  everyone  capable  of  manufacturing  a  shadow  of  excuse  the 
conviction  that  he  had  the  right  to  enter  without  payment.  In  the 
first  few  minutes  I  saw  seventy  persons  enter  without  tickets,  exclusive 
of  the  house  employees  and  men  in  uniform.  Then  I  burst  into  the 
manager's  office  and  informed  him  that  he  was  going  to  pay  us  our 
percentage  for  every  person  who  had  not,  and  did  not  thereafter,  pay 
an  admission  fee.  He  turned  an  ashy  gray  and  begged  me  to  take 
full  charge  at  the  door.  I  discharged  the  mulatto  girl  on  the  spot, 
made  a  ticket-box  of  my  hand-grip  by  cutting  a  slot  in  it — hitherto 
ticket-takers  had  stuffed  the  tickets  into  their  pockets  or  any  other 
convenient  receptacle — and  proceeded  to  shock  the  good  people  of 
"Beautiful  Horizon." 

An  elaborately  dressed  man  in  a  frock  coat,  accompanied  by  two 
women  glittering  with  diamonds,  pushed   haughtily  past. 

"Your  ticket,  senhor?"  I  smiled,  in  my  most  ceremonial  Portu- 
guese. 

"I  never  pay  admission,"  the  man  replied  haughtily. 

"And  why  don't  you?"  I  retorted,  which  wholly  unprecedented 
question  so  dazed  him  that  without  a  w^ord  he  went  back  to  the  wicket 
and  bought  three  tickets.  The  same  incident  was  repeated  dozens 
of  times  that  evening. 

Another  favorite  trick  was  for  a  man  to  enter  with  one  or  two  women 
and  purchase  tickets  only  for  them. 

"Where  is  yours,  senhor?" 

"Eti  volto"  (I  am  coming  back)  was  the  unvarying  reply,  by  which 
the  speaker  meant  to  imply  that  he  was  merely  going  to  escort  the 
ladies  to  their  seats  and  come  right  out  again,  but  in  almost  every  case 
he  remained  an  hour  or  more  until  the  "Kinetophone"  number  had 
been  run  and  came  slinking  out  with  the  air  of  having  kept  eyes  and 
ears  tight  closed  during  the  performance. 

No  doubt  many  of  the  well-dressed,  haughty  individuals  I  sent  to 
the  box-office  were  state  senators  and  the  like,  but  what  of  it?  We 
were  paying  heavily  to  support  them,  paying  every  time  we  moved 
from  one  town  to  another,  every  time  we  gave  a  performance,  every 
time  we  left  or  entered  a  state,  in  addition  to  what  we  had  paid  to 
enter  the  countr}',  every  time  we  drew  a  check,  or  put  up  a  poster,  or 
inserted  an  advertisement,  and  even  in  my  most  charitable  mood  I  could 
not  see  why  we  should  give  free  entertainment  to  any  government 
official  who  was  not  there  in  line  of  duty. 


324  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

During  the  second  section  a  chinless,  pomaded  popinjay  in  full 
evening  dress,  with  an  own-the-earth  air,  pushed  scornfully  past  when 
I  asked  for  his  ticket.  I  stepped  in  his  way,  repeated  my  question, 
and  finally  laid  a  hand  lightly  on  his  arm,  whereupon  the  manager, 
frightened  to  a  kind  of  grayish  pink,  came  running  forward  to  assure  me 
"It's  all  right." 

"But  who  is  he?"  I  insisted. 

"I  '11  tell  you  later,"  whispered  the  trembling  mulatto. 

The  chinless  individual,  who  turned  out  to  be  the  dclegado,  cor- 
responding to  our  chief  of  police,  remained  only  a  few  minutes,  all 
tlie  while  plainly  boiling  with  rage.  As  he  came  out  he  stopped  before 
me — the  rush  having  ceased  I  was  seated — and  in  a  voice  and  manner 
that  no  doubt  scared  ordinary  people  to  death,  he  growled : 

"Before  you  ever  grasp  anyone  by  the  arm  again  you  want  to 
know  who  he  IS !" 

"Senhor,"  I  replied,  without  rising,  which  is  a  shocking  insult 
even  to  the  most  petty  Brazilian  official,  'T  want  to  know  who  everyone 
is,  and  any  man  who  is  a  cavalheiro  will  tell  who  he  is  under  such 
circumstances  in  any  civilized  country,  and  until  I  know  who  he  is 
I  '11  catch  him  b}^  the  arm  or  by  any  other  part  of  the  anatomy  that 
is  handy." 

He  went  out,  fuming  at  the  nostrils,  leaving  me  wondering  if  he 
would  send  a  subordinate  to  place  me  under  arrest,  but  abuse  of 
authority  had  become  so  rampant  that  I  would  have  been  willing  to 
explore  the  interior  of  a  Brazilian  prison  to  bring  the  matter  to  a 
head.  When  the  performance  was  ended  I  cornered  the  manager  in 
his  office  and  forced  him  to  pay  us  our  share  for  every  "deadhead" 
I  had  counted,  and  though  he  and  his  equally  dusky  assistant  hastened 
to  assure  me  that  my  demands  were  wholly  justified  and  that  they 
did  not  stop  officials  and  ladies  "because  they  did  not  have  the 
courage  of  Americans,"  there  was  something  in  their  manner  that 
told  me  they  would  have  taken  supreme  delight  in  knifing  me  in  the 
back.  That  evening  I  turned  my  papers,  valuables,  and  revolver  over  to 
"Tut,"  in  order  to  be  prepared  for  the  probable  next  move  of  the 
delegado.  But  he  must  have  suffered  a  change  of  heart,  for  there- 
after even  soldiers  and  policemen  in  uniform  had  orders  to  pay  admis- 
sion unless  they  were  on  duty  and  wearing  their  sidearms  to  prove  it. 
Thenceforward  every  resident  of  Bello  Horizonte  who  entered  the 
"Cinema  Commercio"  either  handed  in  a  ticket  or  gave  proof  of  his 
right  to  free  admission,  whether  he  was  president,  senator  or  state 


WANDERING  IN  MINAS  GERAES  325 

dog-catcher.  When  we  had  broken  all  records  for  the  time  and 
place,  I  ran  the  second  section  of  the  show  myself,  just  to  keep  in 
practice  against  the  day  when  I  must  become  a  motion  picture  operator, 
and  went  to  bed  leaving  orders  to  be  called  at  dawn.  By  this  timi 
"Tut"  spoke  considerable  Portuguese — though,  having  learned  it 
mainly  from  Carlos,  he  had  many  of  the  errors  of  grammar  and 
pronunciation  of  Brazil's  laboring  class — so  that  I  left  on  my  next 
advance  trip  with  less  misgiving. 

Nowadays  you  can  go  to  famous  old  Diamantina  by  rail.  The 
world  is  building  so  many  railways  that  there  will  soon  be  no  place  left 
for  those  who  prefer  travel  to  train-riding.  I  had  little  hope  that  the 
diamond  town  would  prove  worth  the  time  and  expense  necessary 
to  bring  the  Kinetophone  to  it,  but  I  had  a  personal  desire  to  see 
it,  and  also,  though  I  could  not  get  exact  information  on  the  subject, 
the  map  suggested  that  I  might  be  able  to  cross  on  muleback  from 
Diamantina  to  Victoria  and  thereby  save  myself  a  long  and  round- 
about trip. 

The  rain  had  let  up  at  last,  though  sullenly,  like  a  despot  forced 
out  of  power.  All  that  day  there  came  the  frequent  cry  of  "chiero 
de  panno  qtieimado!"  (smell  of  burned  cloth),  whereupon  everyone 
jumped  up  and  shook  himself — everyone,  that  is,  except  the  advance- 
agent  of  the  Kinetophone,  who  had  ridden  behind  Brazilian  wood- 
burners  often  enough  to  know  how  to  dress  for  the  occasion.  Our 
"express"  not  only  stopped  but  was  sidetracked  at  every  station,  and 
every  time  it  gave  a  sign  of  coming  to  a  halt  the  passengers  sprang 
up  as  one  man,  crying  "A  tomar  cafe!"  and  poured  out  upon  the 
platform,  to  return  growling  if  even  a  dog-kennel  of  a  station  miles 
from  nowhere  was  not  prepared  to  serve  them  their  incessant  beverage. 
"Tut"  used  to  say  that  the  Brazilians  drank  so  much  coffee  that  their 
minds  went  to  dregs.  It  is  a  curious  paradox,  too,  that  the  Brazilian, 
often  an  unprincipled  rogue  in  business,  never  dreams  of  cheating 
the  cofTee-man  out  of  his  tostao,  even  if  he  has  to  exert  himself  to 
hunt  him  up  and  pay  it  before  scrambling  aboard  again  as  the  warning- 
bell  rings. 

Beyond  Sete  Lagoas  the  country  began  to  flatten  out,  with  patches 
of  corn  in  new  clearings,  then  more  and  more  heavy  brush  and  only 
the  red-eardi  railway  cutting  and  a  wire  fence  on  either  side.  Curvello, 
the  largest  town  of  the  day,  was  almost  a  city,  but  so  largely  made 
up  of  negro  huts  that  it  probably  would  not  have  paid  us  to  make  it 
a  professional  visit.     The  traveler  never  ceases  to  wonder  how  all 


326  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Brazil  came  to  swarm  so  with  negroes;  all  the  ships  of  Christendom 
could  not  have  brought  so  many  from  Africa,  and  the  original  slaves 
must  have  multiplied  like  guineapigs.  In  the  afternoon  I  got  reckless 
and  bought  an  apple,  which  only  cost  me  a  milreis — but  then,  it  was 
a  very  small  apple.  Far  up  here  in  the  interior  prices  seemed  to  be 
easing  off  a  bit,  but  this  was  largely  offset  by  the  lack  of  small  change. 
In  contrast  to  Rio,  there  was  almost  no  silver  or  nickel,  which 
made  an  excellent  excuse  for  plundering  the  traveler  of  a  few  tostoes 
every  time  he  approached  a  ticket-window,  and  forcing  him  to  accept 
dirty  old  bills  often  patched  together  out  of  six  or  seven  pieces  that 
were  completely  illegible. 

It  would  have  been  sunset,  had  there  been  one,  by  the  time  we 
pulled  into  Curralinho,  whence  a  branch  line  carries  a  two-car  train 
three  times  a  week  to  Diamantina.  I  believe  I  was  the  only  first-class 
traveler  with  a  ticket  next  day,  one  having  a  kilometer-book  and 
the  rest  government  passes  or  uniforms.  There  was  not  a  woman 
on  board,  though  one  man  wath  a  government  pass  had  with  him  a 
boy  of  seven  who,  the  conductor  weakly  declared,  should  pay  half 
fare;  but  he  did  not  insist  and  let  the  matter  slide  in  the  customary 
Brazilian  way.  No  wonder  the  Belgian  syndicate  which  built  this 
line  and  another  starting  toward  Diamantina  from  Victoria  hovers 
on  the  verge  of  bankruptcy,  though  my  own  ticket  cost  i4$8oo,  plus 
I $600  for  the  federal  government  and  i$6oo  for  the  State  of  Minas, 
or  $5.80  for  ninety-five  miles  of  uncomfortable  travel. 

Except  in  spots  the  country  was  almost  sertao,  a  bushy  wilderness 
with  here  and  there  long  piles  of  wood  for  the  engines.  We  crossed 
the  Rio  das  Velhas,  flowing  northward  and  inland,  carrying  red  earth 
in  solution  and  pieces  it  had  torn  away  from  the  forests  through  which 
it  had  commandeered  passage.  There  were  some  cattle  and  here  and 
there  a  patch  of  bananas  in  a  hollow  with  a  hut  or  two,  but  the  rest 
was  a  desolation  of  black  rock,  which  proved  to  be  white  inside  where 
the  railroad  builders  had  broken  into  it.  Rare  patches  of  corn  were 
the  only  visible  cultivation;  between  scattered  collections  of  miserable 
adobe  huts  there  appeared  to  be  no  travel;  the  listless  part-negroes 
lolling  their  lives  contentedly  away  in  their  kennels  seemed  to  raise 
nothing  but  children  and,  not  being  cannibals,  it  was  a  mystery  what 
they  lived  on.  Slowly  and  painfully  we  climbed  to  the  top  of  a  great 
ridge,  a  wild  country  of  barren  rocks  heaped  up  into  hills  that  were 
almost  mountains,  drear  and  treeless  as  the  landscape  of  Cerro  de 
Pasco.     No  wonder  the  men  who  wardered  up  here  seeking  their 


WANDERING  IN  MINAS  GERAES  327 

fortunes  thought  the  bright  pebbles  they  picked  up  worth  keeping, 
if  only  to  break  the  melancholy  monotony. 

Beyond  a  miserable  collection  of  huts  where  those  of  robust  nerves 
ate  "breakfast,"  we  passed  the  highest  railway  point  in  Brazil,  4,600 
feet  above  sea-level,  whence  vast  reaches  of  dreary  country,  broken  as 
a  frozen  sea,  spread  to  the  horizon  in  all  directions.  The  last  station 
before  Diamantina  looked  like  a  town  in  Judea,  so  ugly  was  the  deso- 
lation that  surrounded  it,  and  across  this  one  gazed  as  vainly  for  the 
city  which  the  map  proclaimed  near  at  hand  as  one  may  stare  for 
a  glimpse  of  La  Paz  from  the  plains  of  Bolivia  high  above  it. 

Ten  years  before,  one  traveled  on  muleback  all  the  way  from  Sahara 
to  reach  the  heart  of  Brazil's  diamond-bearing  territory,  and  only 
this  same  year  had  the  inaugural  train  reached  Diamantina,  amid 
hilarious  rejoicing  of  its  population.  In  the  few  months  that  had 
passed  since,  the  inhabitants  had  not  lost  tlie  sense  of  wonder  which 
the  tri- weekly  arrival  of  the  puffing  monster  on  wheels  gave  them,  and 
though  it  was  Christmas  Day,  nearly  the  whole  town  had  climbed  to 
the  station  to  greet  us.  For  climb  they  must.  A  youth  of  decided 
African  lineage  took  my  bag  and  we  stepped  over  the  edge  of  the  unin- 
habited plateau,  to  find  a  town  heaped  up  directly  below  us,  all 
visible  roads  and  trails  pitching  swiftly  down  into  it.  The  medieval 
streets  were  rough-paved  in  misshapen  cobbles,  with  a  kind  of  side- 
walk  of  naturally  flat  stones  running  down  the  center.  The  town 
was  labyrinthian,  its  narrow  blocks  of  every  possible  form  between 
the  narrower  streets,  built  to  fit  the  lay  of  the  land,  spilling  down 
on  the  farther  side  into  a  deep  valley  and  backed  on  all  sides  by  a 
rough  and  savage  landscape  of  blackish  hue  as  far  as  the  eye  could 
see.  It  was  as  picturesque  as  Ouro  Preto,  which  it  seemed  to  equal 
in  age,  though  it  had  been  somewhat  less  elaborately  built  than  the 
old  state  capital,  and  its  churches  were  fewer,  smaller,  and  more  in- 
significant. The  fact  that  here  also  there  were  no  vehicles  may  be 
one  of  the  reasons  why  the  population  seemed  so  healthy  and  active — 
climbing  to  the  station  alone  proved  that — in  spite  of  their  decidedly 
preponderating  negro  blood. 

The  railroad  had  not  yet  brought  them  long  enough  into  contact 
with  the  outside  world  to  spoil  the  simple  people  of  Diamantina. 
They  seemed  to  live  together  like  a  great  affectionate  family,  soft- 
mannered  and  little  given  to  quarreling,  even  the  street  boys  treating 
one  another  like  French  diplomats.  No  doubt  it  was  their  negro 
blood,   perhaps   also    the   adventurous   happy-go-lucky,    take-a-chance 


328  WORKING  NORTH  FROjM  PATAGONIA 

character  natural  to  a  mining  community,  that  gave  them  their  con- 
siderable gaiety.  There  was  no  evidence  of  anything  but  kindliness 
and  good-feeling  among  the  barefoot  women  who  stopped  to  gossip 
with  water-jars  set  jauntily  on  their  heads — real  jars,  too,  for  Dia- 
r^antina  is  so  far  away  from  the  world  that  American  oil  tins  have 
not  yet  come  to  usurp  the  place  of  picturesque  native  pottery.  As 
final  high  praise,  my  hotel  host  asserted  that  the  town  is  so  different 
from  the  rest  of  Brazil  that  a  man  can  occasionally  visit  a  family 
with  unmarried  daughters  without  bringing  them  into  disrepute 
among  public  gossips.    It  is,  indeed,  a  Brazilian  Utopia ! 

I  was  Diamantina's  star  guest  during  my  stay,  having  the  main 
room  in  the  main  hotel  looking  out  on  the  main  praqa.  The  latter 
v\-as  small  and  three-cornered,  paved  with  cobbles  back  in  the  days 
of  Shakespeare,  and  had  in  its  center  a  bust  of  a  native  of  Diamantina 
who  was  Minister  of  Viagao  when  President  Peganha  was  coaxed  into 
signing  the  decree  giving  the  Belgians  the  concession  for  their  railroad. 
But  then,  Brazil  is  the  land  of  busts,  and  the  man  who  does  not  succeed 
in  getting  at  least  one  of  himself  tucked  away  in  some  praga  is  not 
riuch  of  a  buster.  My  huge  front  room,  next  to  the  homelike  hotel 
parlor  with  many  chairs  and  a  cane  divan  all  dressed  up  in  lace 
coats,  was  fully  twenty  feet  square,  its  immense  French  windows 
reaching  to  a  floor  made  of  great  hand-cut  planks  fastened  by  hand- 
made spikes  with  heads  an  inch  square — or  in  diameter,  according  as 
the  blacksmith  happened  to  shape  them — and  so  glass-smooth  and 
warped  and  twisted  that  in  places  one  liad  to  brace  one's  legs  to  keep 
from  sliding  downhill  along  it.  The  house  seemed  older  than  the 
surrounding  hills,  but  there  is  so  much  of  the  new  and  crude  in  Brazil 
tliat  the  old  cannot  but  be  greatly  relished.  As  a  matter  of  fact  Dia- 
mantina does  not  deserve  a  public  hostlery,  for  nearly  all  its  visitors 
have  the  South  American  habit  of  stopping  with  friends  or  relatives, 
and  for  all  its  electric  lights  and  spring  beds,  and  moderate  charges, 
the  hotel  had  only  a  couple  of  paying  guests. 

The  adventurous  handeirantcs  of  Sao  Paulo  first  penetrated  this 
region  looking  for  gold.  A  considerable  amount  of  it  was  found  in 
the  muddy  stream  at  the  foot  of  the  present  town,  and  early  in  the 
seventeenth  century  the  adventurers  founded  the  village  of  Tijuca, 
which  took  its  name  from  a  nearby  swamp.  In  olden  times  gold 
dust  and  tiny  nuggets  were  used  as  money  throughout  the  region,  and 
there  were  scales  in  every  shop.  Gold  seems  to  be  found  almost 
anywhere  in  the  region,  and  placer-mining  is  the  natural  occupation 


WANDERING  IN  MINAS  GERAES  329 

of  all  its  inhabitants.  When  electric-light  poles  were  put  up  by  a 
syndicate  at  Boa  Vista,  in  order  to  give  Diamantina  as  light  by  night 
what  the  company  uses  as  power  during  the  day,  tlie  children  carried 
off  the  earth  dug  up  from  the  holes  to  wash  out  the  gold.  After  a 
heavy  rain  tiny  particles  of  gold  are  picked  up  in  the  gutters  of 
Diamantina  and  along  the  edge  of  the  little  stream  below  it.  So 
here  at  last  is  a  place  where  you  can  really  pick  up  gold  in  the 
streets,  yet  the  people  are  poorer  and  more  ragged  than  those  who 
live  by  planting  beans. 

It  was  while  searching  for  gold  that  the  miners  of  Tijuca  came 
across  many  bright,  half-transparent  pebbles  that  were  plainly  of  no 
use  to  them,  but  the  largest  of  which  they  gave  to  their  children  or 
used  as  counters  in  their  own  card  games.  There  were  a  bushel  or 
more  of  them  in  such  use  in  the  village  and  its  vicinity  when  a  new 
priest  arrived  from  Portugal.  In  his  first  game  of  cards  the  pious 
padre  noticed  the  peculiar  poker  chips  that  everyone  produced  by 
the  handful.  He  let  the  information  leak  out  that  he  thought  them 
very  pretty,  and  would  be  pleased  to  have  them  as  keepsakes.  They 
were  quite  worthless,  of  course,  to  his  new  parishioners,  and  if  his 
innocent  sacerdotal  eye  was  caught  by  their  transparent  brightness, 
they  saw  no  reason  why  they  should  not  humor  his  w4iim,  and  at  t!^.e 
same  time  gain  in  favor  with  the  Church,  by  giving  him  such  of  the 
worthless  little  baubles  as  he  did  not  win  at  cards.  Thus  he  gathered 
together  half  a  bushel  or  more  of  the  pebbles,  and  suddenly  disap- 
peared in  the  general  direction  of  Amsterdam,  dropping  a  hint  iu 
Rio  on  the  way. 

Word  soon  reached  the  Portuguese  crown  of  this  new  form  of 
riches  in  its  overseas  possessions.  It  turned  out  that  the  range  of 
hills  from  well  south  of  the  present  town  of  Diamantina  to  far  up 
in  Bahia,  a  tract  of  more  than  four  hundred  square  leagues,  was 
diamond-bearing  land.  Indeed,  if  one  may  believe  local  conviction, 
the  finest  diamonds  in  existence  come  from  Minas  Geraes,  and  the 
world's  most  famous  black  diamonds  from  Bahia  State  a  bit  farther 
north. 

Diamonds  were  first  discovered  in  India  and  for  centuries  came 
only  from  there.  When  they  were  found  in  Brazil,  thousands  of  the 
stones  were  sold  as  Indian  diamonds  not  only  because  buyers  were 
prejudiced,  but  because  the  Portuguese  government  had  forbidden 
private  mining  on  penalty  of  death,  and  the  contrabandists  were 
forced  to  reach  their  market  by  way  of  India.     The  village  of  Tijuca 


330  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

became  a  flourishing  center,  far  as  it  was  from  the  outside  world, 
and  for  all  the  stern  government  regime  set  over  the  region.  In 
1734  Portugal  sent  out  an  "Intendente  Geral  dos  Diamantes,"  with 
absolute  power  to  enforce  the  government  monopoly.  His  palace 
still  exists  in  a  garden  near  the  top  of  the  town,  with  the  remains  of 
an  artificial  lake  on  which  he  kept  a  sailboat  to  show  the  people  of 
what  came  gradually  to  be  known  as  Diamantina  how  he  had  crossed 
the  sea.  The  crown  forbade  individual  mining  and  gave  the  job  to 
contractors,  who  worked  six  hundred  slaves  and  paid  220-240$  yearly 
per  slave  for  the  privilege,  yet  who  made  fortunes  even  though  all 
large  diamonds  and  twenty  per  cent,  of  all  finds  went  to  the  crown. 
Population  multiplied  and  Diamantina  became  a  center  of  riches 
and  luxury.  Contrary  to  the  case  in  the  rest  of  Brazil,  many  broken 
noblemen  and  men  of  education  came  here  to  mend  their  fortunes,  and 
the  colony,  and  eventually  all  the  province  of  Minas  Geraes,  became 
a  focus  of  "civilization,"  as  that  word  was  understood  in  those  days, — 
much  powdered  hair,  knee-breeches,  beauty  patches,  minuets — and 
swarms  of  miserable  slaves.  It  may  be  that  the  courtesy  of  the  poor 
Africanized  inhabitants  of  to-day  is  but  a  hold-over  from  those  times 
of  elaborate  etiquette. 

Amazing  tales  are  still  told  in  Diamantina  of  its  golden  days.  It 
was  evidently  the  custom  of  the  government  viceroys  to  imprison  the 
contractors  as  soon  as  they  got  rich  and  "roll"  them  penniless.  One 
official  is  reputed  to  have  made  every  guest  a  present  of  a  cluster  of 
diamonds.  The  Grupo  Escolar,  or  school  building,  across  the  street 
from  my  hotel  was  once  the  residence  of  a  great  diamond  buyer,  and 
when  the  building  was  made  into  a  school  some  years  ago  a  score  or 
more  of  skeletons  were  found  tumbled  together  in  the  bottom  of  a 
secret  shaft.  This  revived  the  legend  that  the  buyer  had  a  chair  set 
on  a  trapdoor,  and  when  a  man  came  in  with  a  large  "parcel"  of  con- 
traband diamonds  he  was  asked  to  sit  down  and  make  himself  at 
home  while  the  buyer  looked  over  the  stones — and  brought  up  at  the 
bottom  of  the  shaft. 

In  1 771  the  famous  Pombal  sent  out  the  "green  book,"  with  fifty- 
four  despotic  articles  that  nearly  depopulated  the  district,  but  in 
1800  the  regime  softened,  and  finally,  in  1832,  the  government  mon- 
opoly was  abolished.  Since  then  mining  has  been  more  or  less  inter- 
mittent. Diamonds  reached  their  highest  price  during  the  war  with 
Paraguay,  at  the  end  of  which,  in  1867,  the  stones  were  found  in 
South  Africa,  a  blow  from  which  the  industry  in  Brazil  has  never 


WANDERING  IN  MINAS  GERAES  331 

recovered.  For  while  it  is  claimed  in  Diamantina  that  Brazilian 
diamonds  average  much  higher  than  those  from  the  Cape,  the  African 
mines  now  produce  at  least  eighty  per  cent,  of  the  world's  supply  and 
with  more  modern  methods  and  widespread  propaganda  completely 
control  the  market.  Abolition  was  the  final  straw,  and  in  five  years 
exportations  of  diamonds  from  Diamantina  dropped  from  2,500  to 
300  annually. 

Unlike  those  of  South  Africa,  the  diamonds  of  Brazil  are  found  on 
or  near  the  surface.  In  a  few  places  quartz  is  broken  open  in  the 
search,  but  in  general  they  are  taken  loose  in  the  gravel  of  the  alluvial 
deposits  by  the  simpler  process  of  placer  mining.  The  fact  that 
enormous  tracts  of  territory  were  worked  over  by  the  Portuguese  does 
not  mean  that  they  took  out  fabulous  amounts,  according  to  modern 
local  authorities,  because  they  had  to  feed  their  slaves  anyway  and 
it  was  to  their  advantage  to  keep  them  working,  even  if  the  finds  were 
few.  To-day,  though  there  are  some  syndicates  and  large  companies, 
most  of  them  are  completely  paralyzed  and  such  work  as  is  done  is 
mainly  by  individual  natives.  The  company  troubles  seem  to  be  due 
to  lack  of  a  good  mining  law — natives  may  wash  for  diamonds  any- 
where, even  on  company  claims — the  insecurity  of  titles,  the  prohibi- 
tive cost  of  transportation  for  machinery,  high  tariffs,  low  rate  of 
exchange,  the  constant  war  of  South  Africans  against  South  American 
diamonds,  and  finally  the  "salting"  of  mines  by  fake  promoters, 
coupled  with  carelessness  of  foreign  stockholders  in  sending  out 
experts  to  examine  the  ground  before  accepting  even  an  honest 
promoter's  word  for  it.  Thus  fortunes  have  been  lost  in  the  Brazilian 
diamond  fields,  notwithstanding  the  fact  that  diamonds  continue  to  be 
steadily  picked  up  in  them. 

The  largest  diamond  ever  found  in  Brazil  was  the  "Star  of  the 
South,"  found  at  Agua  Suja  (Dirty  Water),  on  the  line  to  Catalao. 
This  weighed  about  the  same  as  the  famous  Kohinoor  diamond, — 300 
carats.  The  stones  are  usually  found  in  the  beds  of  rivers,  larger 
near  the  source,  and  smaller  farther  down,  for  they  wear  off  in 
traveling,  and  in  sand,  earth,  and  common  gravel,  usually  with  gold. 
Rough  diamonds  generally  have  no  brilliancy,  looking  merely  like 
white,  half-transparent  pebbles,  though  any  child  of  Diamantina  is  said 
to  be  able  to  recognize  one  at  a  glance.  There  is  really  nothing  more 
prosaic  than  diamond  gathering,  and  the  resemblance  is  slight  between 
those  who  hunt  for  and  those  who  wear  them.  None  of  the  improved 
methods  of  South  Africa  have  been  introduced  into  Brazil,  not  even 


332  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

the  hand  screen  or  the  "grease  board,"  and  the  negroes  still  use  the 
batea,  or  wooden  bowl  in  the  shape  of  a  hand  basin,  in  washing  for 
both  diamonds  and  gold.  When  he  has  chosen  his  spot  beside  some 
stream  the  negro  sets  up  a  baca,  a  kind  of  topless  soapbox  with  one 
end  knocked  out,  about  six  inches  above  the  surface  of  the  water  and 
fills  it  with  gravel.  Then  with  the  batea  he  scoops  up  water  and 
throws  it  with  a  peculiar  flip  on  the  gravel,  washing  it  from  side  to 
side  until  the  loose  stuff  runs  off  and  leaves  only  the  pebbles.  These 
are  then  spread  out  and  gone  over  carefully  by  hand,  the  diamonds 
being  readily  detected  by  the  experienced  eye,  particularly  since,  unlike 
the  other  stones,  they  cannot  be  wet  and  for  that  reason  stand  out 
brilliantly  from  the  rest.  In  fact,  in  Spanish  and  Portuguese  they 
are  as  often  called  brillantcs  as  diamantes.  With  the  war  and  the 
sudden  drop  in  the  diamond  market  that  came  with  it  the  people  of 
Diamantina  largely  left  off  hunting  for  diamonds  and  began  the 
more  paying  occupations  of  planting  corn  and  gathering  firewood. 

On  the  Sunday  afternoon  following  Christmas,  the  rain  having 
at  last  ceased,  I  went  out  for  a  walk.  An  hour's  climb,  in  which  I 
did  not  suffer  from  heat,  brought  me  to  a  cross  on  the  culminating 
point  of  the  great  mass  of  gray-black  rock  of  ragged  formation 
across  the  valley  and  small  stream  in  which  many  a  diamond  has 
been  picked  up  and  much  gold  washed.  Here  is  a  full  view  of  the 
town,  stacked  up  on  the  green  and  fertile  side  of  the  long  valley  and 
spilling  like  coagulated  grease  down  into  it,  scattered  groups  of  euca- 
lyptus trees  and  its  general  greenness  in  great  contrast  to  the  rockiness 
of  all  the  rest  of  the  vast  and  jagged  encircling  landscape.  The  gothic 
church  of  Coraqao  de  Jesus  and  the  tree-girdled  seminary  stand 
somewhat  above  the  rest  of  the  orderless  heap,  and  one  realizes  that 
the  railroad  does  indeed  come  in  at  the  top  of  the  town,  for  its 
station  is  so  high  that  here  it  cannot  be  seen  above  the  edge  of  the 
plateau  on  which  it  sits.  Diamantina  is  a  great  trading  post  of  the 
interior,  and  down  in  the  center  of  town  there  is  a  species  of  Arab 
khan,  a  roof  on  posts  where  shaggy  sun-,  rain-,  and  road-marked 
muleteers  with  long,  ugly  facas  in  their  belts  pile  their  saddle-blankets 
and  goods  and  cook  over  campfires.  The  old.  old  highway  unravels 
down  across  the  broken  rocky  hills,  descends  into  the  valley,  stops 
a  while  at  the  khan,  and  having  gathered  its  forces  together  once  more 
into  a  compact  trail,  marches  across  and  out  of  the  valley  again  and  away 
over  the  bleak  horizon. 

It  was  in  the  middle  of  this  public  trail  that  I  came  upon  two  negroes 


WANDERING  IN  MINAS  GERAES  333 

in  quest  of  gold  washed  down  by  the  recent  rains.  While  one  dug 
up  wooden  bowls  of  earth  and  gravel,  the  other  stood  knee-deep  in 
a  muddy,  dammed-up  pool  and,  fdling  his  batca  with  the  earth  brought 
by  the  other  and  letting  water  into  it,  whirled  it  about  until  the  heavy 
matter  went  to  the  bottom.  Then  he  scraped  off  by  hand  the  top 
layer,  continuing  the  process  until  within  ten  minutes  he  had  left 
about  a  quart  of  heavy  black  earth.  This  he  dumped  with  more  of 
the  same  in  a  white  sand-nest  he  had  made  on  the  bank  of  the  little 
stream  crossing  the  trail.  Like  most  of  his  fellow-townsmen  he  was 
talkative  and  ready  to  explain  his  affairs  to  a  stranger.  He  had 
washed  for  gold  after  a  rain  ever  since  he  was  a  boy,  getting  from 
two  to  four  milreis  worth  every  time,  and  where  there  is  gold  there 
are  sure  to  be  diamonds,  especially  the  "chapeu  de  palha"  ("straw 
hat"),  which  he  explained  to  be  a  very  flat  diamond  making  much 
show  with  little  weight.  Though  both  he  and  his  companion  were 
shoeless  and  had  been  from  infancy,  ragged,  illiterate  and  half  tooth- 
less, they  were  far  from  ignorant  on  some  points,  especially  of 
words  used  in  the  diamond  industry,  which  they  spoke  with  a  curious 
negro  mispronunciation  mixed  with  slang. 

In  riding  about  the  vicinity  on  other  days  I  came  upon  several  gangs 
of  a  score  of  negroes  each,  barelegged  and  ragged,  hoeing  at  an 
average  wage  of  eighty  cents  a  day  in  banks  of  red  earth  through 
which  a  rainy  season  stream  had  been  turned.  This  they  keep  up 
as  long  as  the  rains  last,  rarely  seeing  a  diamond,  which  wash  along 
through  the  artificial  gorge  with  the  other  gravel  and  come  to  rest 
on  a  sandy  flat  place  beyond.  Then  the  men  are  set  to  "batting  the 
baca,"  until  the  sand  is  washed  away  and  the  diamonds  recovered  by 
the  same  crude  methods  used  in  the  first  days  of  the  colony.  One 
question  almost  sure  to  be  asked  by  the  layman  is  how  workmen  are 
kept  from  stealing  the  diamonds.  Theft,  it  is  explained,  is  by  no 
means  so  easy  to  accomplish  as  would  appear  at  first  glance.  In  the 
first  place,  it  takes  on  the  average  a  cartload  of  sand  and  gravel 
to  yield  a  one-quarter  carat  diamond.  By  the  time  the  negro  has 
washed  a  load  down  to  about  two  bushels  an  overseer  has  an  eye  on 
him  and  watches  him  until  the  process  is  finished.  It  is  rare  for  a 
diamond  to  appear  suddenly  on  the  surface  during  the  preliminary 
washing,  when  the  negro  might  snatch  it,  and  even  if  he  did  he  would 
have  a  hard  time  selling  it.  If  ever  a  native  of  Diamantina  has  stolen 
a  diamond,  even  as  a  boy,  he  is  blackballed  in  the  community  for  the 
rest  of  his  life.     It  is  a  long  way  to  anywhere  else,  even  since  the 


334  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

advent  of  the  railroad,  so  that  thieving  of  the  tov^n's  chief  product  is 
extremely  unusual.  Men  from  far  off  up  country  come  in  with 
thousands  of  dollars'  worth  of  diamonds  or  black  carbons  on  a  pack 
mule,  which  lags  far  behind  with  its  negro  driver.  Everyone  along 
the  way  knows  what  it  carries,  yet  for  decades  no  driver  has  run 
away  nor  anyone  "framed"  a  holdup. 

In  town,  gold  and  precious  stones  are  handled  with  a  casual  care- 
lessness only  equalled  by  the  Bank  of  England.  A  local  jewelry 
shop,  famous  in  the  trade  the  world  over,  looks  like  a  miserable 
little  tinker's  den,  where  a  dozen  men  and  boys,  all  with  more  or 
less  African  blood,  work  at  dirty  old  worn  and  smoked  benches. 
About  them  is  a  wilderness  of  junk  where  cigarette  butts,  gold  nuggets, 
old  iron  tools,  gold  wire,  and  worthless  odds  and  ends  lie  scattered 
and  tumbled  together  with  diamonds  of  all  sizes,  cut  and  uncut,  old 
tin  tobacco-boxes  containing  fortunes  in  diamonds  and  precious  stones 
of  several  species  wrapped  in  dirty  bits  of  paper.  Gold  coins  of  the 
former  Empire  as  well  as  new  British  sovereigns  waiting  to  be  melted 
up  for  local  use  can  scarcely  be  distinguished  from  the  dusty  rubbish 
on  the  tables ;  drawers  filled  with  the  ragged  money  of  to-day  stand  half- 
open  ;  a  tiny  show-window — recently  put  in  as  a  concession  to  modern 
ideas— has  a  six-carat  diamond  stuck  against  the  glass  with  several 
smaller  ones  about  it,  day  and  night ;  a  can  that  originally  held  soap  but 
now  full  of  emeralds,  amethysts,  topazes,  and  half  a  dozen  other 
precious  stones  found  in  the  region  was  kicking  about  the  floor.  Yet 
there  was  no  sign  of  lock  or  key,  except  that  used  to  fasten  the  outer 
door  at  night.  The  owner  only  came  now  and  then  during  the  day, 
and  amid  this  disordered  jumble  of  wealth  his  dozen  workmen  and 
boys  toiled  from  seven  in  the  morning  until  sometimes  nine  at  night 
at  ludicrous  wages  without  a  loss  ever  having  been  reported. 

Down  in  the  valley  near  the  town  there  is  a  native  diamond-cutting 
establishment,  a  capacious  old  barn  of  a  building  with  the  immense 
rough-hewn  beams  of  olden  times  and  two  long  double  rows  of 
"wheels"  run  by  water-power  on  which  the  stones  are  "cut."  Strictly 
speaking,  a  diamond  is  not  "cut"  at  all ;  it  is  ground— /o/'i(/ar  or  "ston- 
ing" they  call  it  in  Brazil.  Disks  of  the  best  grade  steel,  about  a 
foot  in  diameter,  move  round  and  round  at  a  moderate  rate  of  speed. 
Rough  diamonds  are  first  chipped  off  by  hand  to  the  general  shape 
desired;  then  they  are  set  into  a  bed  of  lead  and  solder  so  that  one 
facet  may  be  ground  down,  after  which  they  are  removed  at  a  forge, 
resoldered,  and  ground  on  another   facet.     The   "wheels"   must  be 


WANDERrNG  IN  MINAS  GERAES  335 

polished  down  and  filed  in  slight  ridges  every  two  or  three  weeks,  a 
task  that  takes  about  one  day,  and  they  are  rented  at  12$  a  month  to  the 
individual  lapidarios,  both  men  and  women,  largely  of  negro  blood, 
who  work  for  themselves,  either  "cutting"  diamonds  for  others  or 
speculating  with  such  as  they  can  buy  themselves.  A  day  is  the  aver- 
age time  consumed  here  in  "cutting"  a  one-carat  diamond,  at  a  cost 
of  about  7$,  the  chips  and  diamond  dust  left  over  bringing  the  ordi- 
nary income  up  to  65$  a  week. 

Diamond  buyers  of  all  nationalities  journey  to  Diamantina,  and  the 
town  expressed  surprise  and  often  incredulity  to  hear  that  I  had  not 
come  to  purchase  a  few  "parcels"  for  speculation.  "Everyone"  buys  dia- 
monds, yet  no  one  pays  the  state  export  tax  on  them,  if  one  may 
believe  local  opinion.  This  would  have  to  be  paid  if  the  stones  were 
sent  out  legally  by  express,  but  when  a  buyer  has  collected  a  "parcel" 
— in  Portuguese  it  is  partida — he  finds  some  man  bound  for  Rio  and 
says  to  him,  "If  it  is  n't  too  much  trouble  just  hand  this  little  package 
to and  Co.,"  thereby  defrauding  both  the  railroad  and  the  poli- 
ticians. The  men  who  deal  in  diamonds  in  the  place  of  their  origin 
no  more  wear  them  than  do  the  men  who  dig  them.  Old  buyers  who 
have  handled  the  precious  stones  all  their  lives  are  not  only  plainly 
dressed  but  have  none  of  the  tendency  toward  personal  adornment 
so  widespread  among  Brazilians.  Two  American  diamond-men  I 
met  had  huge  blacksmith  hands  on  which  a  ring  would  have  looked 
absurd,  and  the  only  diamonds  one  sees  in  Diamantina  are  those 
offered  for  sale  in  "parcels"  or  show-windows,  or  those  worn  by  an 
occasional  tenderfoot. 

Newcomers  have  sometimes  been  deceived  by  this  state  of  affairs. 
A  few  }ears  ago  there  arrived  in  Diamantina  a  German  with  a  con- 
viction of  his  own  wisdom  and  superiority  over  common  mortals, 
who,  with  an  air  implying  that  the  thought  had  never  occurred  to 
anyone  else,  let  it  leak  out  that  he  was  buying  diamonds.  An  old 
negro  wandered  up  to  the  hotel  in  an  aged  shirt  and  trousers,  a  ragged 
hat,  and  bare  feet,  and  shuffling  in  a  halting,  diffident  way  into  the 
German's  room,  told  him  that  he  did  not  know  what  the  two  diamonds 
he  carried  wrapped  in  a  scrap  of  paper  were  worth,  but  that  he  would 
sell  them  cheap.  The  German  paid  him  about  half  the  market  price 
for  them  and  asked  him  if  he  had  any  more,  adding  with  a  wink 
that  any  transactions  they  might  make  would  be  kept  a  secret.  The 
poor  old  negro  said  he  thought  he  could  find  a  few  more  about  his  hut 
or  in  the  river  or  among  his  friends,  and  for  a  month  or  six  weeks 


336  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

he  continued  to  slouch  into  the  hotel,  until  he  had  sold  the  wise 
German  about  a  pint  of  diamonds  for  a  mere  song  of  fourteen  or 
fifteen  contos,  say  $5,000.  Then  the  Teuton,  highly  pleased  with 
himself,  packed  up  and  took  the  down  train  from  Curvello,  smuggling 
his  untold  riches  out  of  the  state  without  paying  the  export  duty  and — 
and  discovered  when  he  reached  Rio  that  every  one  of  the  fine  diamonds 
the  poor  ignorant  old  negro  had  sold  him  so  cheaply  were  what  are 
known  in  the  trade  as  "fourths,"  or  worse,  full  of  knots  and  gnarls 
as  a  century-old  olive  tree  and  worth  at  most  some  50c  a  carat  for 
cutting  glass.  A  bit  later,  the  poor  innocent  old  negro  having  occasion 
to  go  down  to  the  capital  and  talk  with  the  senator  whose  political 
boss  he  was  in  Diamantina,  blew  into  Rio  in  the  frock-coat  and  patent 
leathers  he  wears  when  not  doing  business  with  gullible  strangers, 
with  a  real  six-carat  diamond  dazzling  from  his  little  finger  and 
two  or  three  more  shouting  from  his  shirt  front  and,  meeting  the 
worldly-wise  German  on  the  Avenida,  raised  his  fifty-dollar  imported 
Panama  hat  with  true  Brazilian  courtesy,  and  invited  him  to  come  in  and 
have  a  drink  for  old  times'  sake. 

One  evening  my  hospitable  host  of  the  hotel  dragged  me  over  to 
the  cinema  he  owned,  where  I  found  a  crowded  house  come  to  see 
what  to  Diamantina  was  a  brand  new  romance  of  their  own  color, 
called  "A  Cabana  do  Pae  Thomaz,"  in  other  words,  "The  Cabin  of 
Uncle  Tom."  It  was  all  too  evident,  however,  that  there  was  nothing 
to  be  gained  by  bringing  our  show  so  far  inland,  for  the  negroes  had, 
little  to  spend  and  the  railway  charges  are  naturally  high  to  those  who 
can  find  no  excuse  for  not  paying  them.  Meanwhile  I  had  opened 
negotiations  for  a  journey  on  horseback,  or  even  on  foot,  across  to 
the  railhead  of  the  line  out  of  Victoria,  which  would  have  brought 
me  out  well  up  the  coast  on  my  journey  north.  A  native  camarada 
familiar  with  the  trail  offered  to  rent  me  a  horse  or  a  mule  for  the 
journey,  with  saddle  and  spurs,  for  3$  a  day.  This  seemed  reasonable. 
It  would  make  the  trip  across  come  to  about  20$?  Yes,  but  it  takes 
two  animals.  Why's  that?  You  must  have  a  guide,  or  at  least  a  man 
to  bring  back  the  horses.  Ah,  then  that  makes  6$  a  day  instead  of 
3$?  Yes — ah — and  then  of  course  you  must  pay  the  man.  How 
much?  Oh,  3$  a  day,  the  same  as  the  other  animals.  Ah,  then  that 
makes  9$  a  day,  and  seven  days  would  be.  .  .  .  No,  say  ten  days. 
But  why  ten  days?  Because  in  this  season  that  is  the  least  you  can 
depend  on.  In  other  words  the  trip  would  cost  me  90$,  nine  times 
ten?     No,  it  would  be  nine  times  twenty,  or  180$.     Eh,  what  twenty 


WANDERING  IN  MINAS  GERAES  33;/ 

days?  Why,  the  man  and  the  horses  would  have  to  come  back, 
would  n't  they  ?  Sacramento,  I  suppose  so,  unless  I  could  chloroform 
them  when  I  got  there.  So  then  180$  would  cover  all  the  expenses? 
All,  completely  all — er — that  is,  of  course,  you  would  have  to  feed 
the  animals  and  the  man  on  the  trip,  and  it  might  be  much  more  than 
ten  days,  and — er,  .  .  .  And  no  doubt  there  would  be  a  tip  to  the 
man  and  the  animals,  and  perhaps  a  third  horse  needed  when  he 
caught  sight  of  my  valise,  and  of  course  the  government  officials  here 
and  along  the  way  would  come  in  for  their  customary  graft,  and 
there  would  be  the  stamp-tax  on  each  horseshoe,  unless  they  were 
muleshoes,  in  which  case  no  doubt  it  would  be  doubled,  and  a  tax 
on  each  bray  the  "burros"  might  emit  en  route,  and — whereupon  I 
gave  him  a  warm  handshake  and  bade  him  good  night,  saying  I  would 
think  it  over  and  wire  him  from  Bagdad  in  1946,  and  thus  eventually 
got  him  out  of  the  room.  In  short,  I  had  come  to  understand  at 
last  why  people  travel  by  rail  in  Brazil,  even  though  their  bones  are 
racked  on  the  warped  and  twisted  roadbeds,  their  movie-magnate  gar- 
ments turned  into  sieves  by  burning  cinders  from  the  straining  loco- 
motives, and  there  is  a  tax  on  every  corner  of  a  railway  ticket. 

All  Diamantina  was  down — I  mean  up —  to  see  us  off,  just  as  they 
are  at  the  same  early  hour  three  times  a  week.  The  distance-blue 
piles  of  earth  lay  heaped  up  into  considerable  hills  where  a  clearer 
atmosphere  disclosed  wider  horizons,  hung  on  all  sides  with  fantastic 
heaps  of  clouds,  that  increased  the  sense  of  bemg  on  the  top  of  the 
world.  On  the  several  days'  trip  southward  I  met  a  strange  man,  a 
juh  dc  dereito,  or  district  judge,  from  Serro  back  in  the  hills,  who 
refused  to  ride  on  a  government  pass  or  to  accept  one  for  his  son, 
whom  he  was  taking  to  the  medical  school  in  Rio,  declaring  that 
there  was  "much  abuse"  in  such  matters  by  government  officials ! 
At  Burnier,  where  we  changed  to  the  broad  gauge,  I  got  a  berth  to  the 
capital.  Though  the  car  was  the  familiar  American  Pullman,  the 
slovenly  government  employees  had  discarded  most  of  the  small 
conveniences.  The  aisle  was  as  carpetless  as  the  floors  of  Brazil,  the 
berth  net  had  long  since  been  turned  into  a  hammock  for  the  brakeman's 
baby,  the  mattress  was  thin  and  hard  as  a  Brazilian  wooden  bed,  and 
the  sleep  I  did  not  get  as  we  creaked  and  jounced  through  the  endless 
low  hills  explained  why  sleeping  cars  and  night  trains  are  not  more 
popular  in  the  mammoth  republic  of  South  America. 

When  I  returned  from  the  washroom  next  morning,  "Tut"  stood 
dressing  beside  the  opposite  berth.     They  had  played  in  Palmyra  the 


338  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

evening  before  and  managed  to  pack  up  in  time  to  catch  the  night 
train.  Carlos  had  had  his  hat  stolen  in  the  preceding  town  and 
"Tut"  had  been  bitten  by  a  dog  while  walking  out  to  pay  his  respects 
to  the  English-speaking  miners  near  Ouro  Preto;  otherwise  things 
had  gone  well — except  for  one  other  personal  mishap  to  "Tut."  While 
buying  his  ticket  for  the  sleeper  he  noted  that  the  berths  were  divided 
into  "leitos  inferiores"  and  "leitos  superiores."  Now  why  should  he 
take  an  inferior  berth  when  he  had  been  working  hard,  and  Linton 
paid  the  bill  anyway?  He  took  a  leito  superior.  Unfortunately,  in 
the  matter  of  berths,  the  Portuguese  word  superior  means  "upper"! 
By  seven  the  day  was  already  brilliant  and  hot,  for  we  were  down  off 
the  great  plateau  I  was  never  to  climb  again,  and  the  familiar  suburbs 
of  Rio  were  rumbling  past.  I  dropped  off  as  we  drew  into  the  yards, 
knowing  from  experience  how  long  a  process  it  is  to  get  into  the  sta- 
tion, and  diving  out  through  a  hole  in  the  railway  wall,  I  hurried  away 
up  the  Rua  Mattoso  to  the  home  of  our  theater  contractor.  He 
surprised  me  by  saying  that  times  had  grown  so  "brutally  hard"  in 
Rio,  to  say  nothing  of  the  brutal  heat  of  midsummer,  that  it  would 
not  be  worth  while  to  play  there  at  all,  but  that  we  could  finish  our 
sixteen  days  with  him  at  his  theater  in  Nictheroy. 

The  ferry  that  carried  us  across  the  bay  was  crowded  with  news- 
paper men  and  photographers,  and  the  gunboat  Sergipe  lay  close  off 
the  state  capital  with  its  guns  trained  on  the  public  buildings.  Inquiry 
disclosed  the  fact  that  there  was  not  a  new  mutiny,  but  that  a  revolution 
was  expected  in  Nictheroy  during  the  day. 

Nilo  Peganha,  son  of  a  former  president  of  Brazil,  had  been  elected 
president  of  the  State  of  Rio  de  Janeiro  for  the  term  to  begin  with 
the  new  year;  but,  as  so  often  happens  in  South  America,  the  oppo- 
sition party  still  in  power  was  determined  to  give  the  office  to  their 
own  defeated  candidate.  This  was  one  Lieutenant  Sodre,  an  army 
man  of  similar  caliber  to  the  celebrated  "Dudu"  and  having  the 
same  backing.  With  the  aid  of  the  outgoing  state  president  he  had 
"acquired"  arms  and  ammunition  from  the  federal  stores  in  Nictheroy 
and  was  preparing  to  take  office  by  force,  having  picked  up  large 
numbers  of  Carioca  crooks  and  gunmen  and  scattered  them  among 
the  various  cities  of  the  state  to  stifle  opposition.  Peganha,  on  the 
other  hand,  had  applied  to  the  Supreme  Court  for  a  habeas  corpus, 
giving  him  the  office  that  was  being  stolen  from  him,  and  after  con- 
siderable dodging  and  hesitation  the  national  president  had  decided  to 


WANDERING  IN  MINAS  GERAES  339 

lend  federal  armed  force  to  uphold  the  Supreme  Court  decision  in 
favor  of  Peqanha. 

Mere  orders  from  the  federal  government  mean  little  in  the  life  of  a 
Brazilian  state,  however,  and  Nictheroy  was  scetiiin^  on  the  brink  of 
anarchy  when  we  landed.  Sodre,  it  seemed,  had  had  himself  sworn  in 
as  president  by  the  state  assembly  early  that  morning  and  had  sent  word 
to  that  effect  to  the  president  of  Brazil.  He  could  not  gain  admission 
to  the  state  presidential  palace,  but  with  the  support  of  the  state  police 
and  the  outgoing  authorities  he  did  take  over  the  presidential  offices. 
Then  suddenly,  some  three  hours  later,  a  cry  of  "Viva  Pcganha!"  had 
resounded  through  the  police  barracks,  the  policemen  had  taken  it  up 
and,  headed  by  two  sergeants,  threatened  to  kill  the  officers  unless  they 
joined  in  also,  and  the  entire  state  police  force  on  which  the  rebel  had 
depended  swung  over  to  the  other  side,  looted  the  stolen  ammunition, 
and  took  to  rushing  about  town  shouting  and  firing  in  the  air. 

This  was  the  condition  in  wdiich  we  found  the  state  capital.  The 
firemen  had  joined  the  police,  and  auto-trucks  crammed  full  of  excited 
shouting  negroes  and  half -negroes  in  uniform  were  rushing  about  town 
at  top  speed,  all  but  overturning  at  every  corner.  The  lower  classes, 
having  likewise  filled  themselves  with  cheap  cachaza,  had  joined  the 
general  uproar  of  noise,  irresponsibility,  and  probable  violence,  and  the 
streets  were  swarming  with  popidarcs  shouting  "Viva  Peqanha!" 
"Viva  o  Salvador  do  Povo !"  and  similar  nonsense  in  maudlin  drunken 
voices,  while  Sodre  sent  hurriedly  to  the  national  president  demanding 
"guarantees"  for  his  personal  safety. 

Residence  in  South  America,  however,  teaches  one  tliat  revolutions 
are  by  no  means  so  dangerous  on  the  spot  as  they  are  in  the  armchairs 
of  those  who  are  reading  about  them  afar  off,  and  we  serenely  con- 
tinued our  preparations  for  the  evening  performance.  Desultory 
shooting,  street  brawls,  and  the  surging  of  masses  of  drunken  popidarcs 
continued  throughout  the  day  and  for  several  days  thereafter,  while  the 
shouting,  shooting  truckloads  of  police  and  firemen  continued  dizzily  to 
round  corners,  each  time  more  nearly  resembling  the  drunken  brute 
into  which  the  tropical  languor  of  negro  militarism  is  apt  to  degenerate 
in  times  of  crisis  or  popular  excitement.  But  it  was,  on  the  whole,  a 
good-natured  rather  than  a  blood-thirsting  brute,  and  though  what 
Brazil  calls  "persons  of  most  responsibility"  kept  out  of  sight,  we  com- 
mon mortals,  including  not  a  few  women,  walked  about  town  attending 
to  our  business  as  usual.  Once  a  ragged,  drunken  mulatto  popular 
came  into  the  Icitcria  in  which  I  was  quenching  my  thirst  with  a  glass 


340  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

of  ice-cold  milk,  walked  bellowing  and  reeling  past  me  and  two  men  at 
another  table  up  to  a  little  messenger-boy  of  fourteen,  and  ordered  him 
to  shout  "Viva  Pecanha!"  The  proprietor  dared  not  protest,  for  the 
police  were  all  drunk  and  the  povo  more  than  likely  to  take  the  raga- 
muffin's part ;  but  when  the  latter  finally  staggered  out  again  the  shop- 
keeper raised  his  hands  to  heaven  and  demanded  to  know  why  the  fellow 
had  picked  on  the  boy  and  not,  for  instance,  pointing  at  me,  on  "o  senhor 
over  there." 

The  "Cinema  Eden"  was  right  on  the  water-front,  though  the  only 
paradise  in  sight  was  the  view  of  Rio  piled  up  into  massive  banks  of 
white  clouds  across  the  emerald  bay  and  the  marvelous  sunset  and  steel- 
blue  dusk  which  spread  over  its  unique,  nature-made  skyline  as  we 
opened  our  doors.  The  near-revolution  was  still  surging  through  the 
streets,  though  a  few  sober  soldiers  of  the  regiment  of  federal  troops 
that  had  been  landed  were  riding  about  town  in  street-cars,  with  ball- 
loaded  muskets  ready  for  action.  Peganha  had  been  sworn  in  that 
afternoon,  surrounded  by  a  swarm  of  other  perspiring  politicians  in 
wintry  frock-coats  and  silk  hats,  but  the  national  president  had  con- 
cluded to  avoid  any  responsibility  in  the  matter  by  calling  a  special  ses- 
sion of  congress  to  decide  between  the  rival  candidates,  instead  of  carry- 
ing ^ut  the  decision  of  the  Supreme  Court — "which,"  perorated  Ruy 
Barboso,  "is  what  our  constitution  orders  and  what  is  practiced  in  the 
United  States,"  two  equally  convincing  final  arguments.  Though  we 
were  the  only  theater  open  the  house  was  not  crowded.  "Persons  of 
most  responsibility"  preferred  to  remain  at  home,  and  the  popularcs 
were  plainly  in  most  cases  without  the  price  of  admission,  even  had 
the  revolution  not  promised  a  more  exciting  show  outside.  I  took 
charge  of  the  door  in  person,  not  at  all  certain  but  that  the  povo  might 
try  to  force  itself  in  en  masse.  Once,  during  our  part  of  the  program, 
a  mighty  explosion  shook  the  town  like  an  earthquake  and  shooting 
sounded  under  our  very  windows;  but  as  the  stampede  for  the  door 
started  I  barricaded  the  immense  exit  and  "Tut"  went  on  calmly  run- 
ning an  amusing  film  known  as  "College  Days,"  and  before  it  was  ended 
the  volatile  audience  had  quieted  down  again.  The  explosion,  it  turned 
out,  was  of  a  great  deposit  of  powder  on  one  of  the  many  islands  in  the 
bay,  nearly  twenty  miles  away. 

Our  receipts  for  the  first  section  were  so  poor  that  we  cut  out  the 
second  and  went  home  for  a  moonlight  dip  in  the  sea  just  outside  our 
water-front  rooms  in  the  charming  residential  district  of  Nictheroy. 
But  it  was  the  last  day  of  the  year,  with  a  crushing  heat  after  the 


WANDERING  IN  MINAS  GERAES  34i 

splendid  air  of  the  plateau,  and  the  soft  wind  that  was  now  sweeping 
across  the  bay  drew  me  back  for  a  last  glimpse  of  Rio  in  the  throes 
of  New  Year's  Eve.  The  city  lay  a  vast  irregular  heap  of  lights,  here 
in  dense  clusters,  there  strung  out  along  the  invisible  lower  hills,  all 
cut  sharp  ofT  at  the  bottom  by  the  endless  row  of  them  along  the  Beira 
Mar,  The  Avenida  was  densely  crowded,  and  getting  more  so.  News- 
papers had  erected  boodis  covered  with  artificial  flowers  and  colored 
lights,  several  police,  fire  department,  and  military  bands  were  scattered 
along  the  great  white  avenue,  and  a  constant,  unbroken  procession  of 
automobiles  crept  up  one  side  and  down  the  other,  pretty  girls  perched 
on  the  backs  of  the  seats  and  on  the  furled  covers,  all  filled  with  the 
"respectable  families"  whose  plump  and  physically  attractive  ladies  are 
rarely  seen  in  the  streets  after  dark  on  any  other  day  in  the  year. 
I  was  caught  where  the  confetti  fell  thickest,  but  there  was  little  rowdy- 
ism and  no  unpleasant  din,  though  paper  ribbons  spun  across  the  lighted 
sea  of  faces  and  perfumed  water  was  squirted  into  them  in  that  good- 
natured  and  outwardly  courteous  way  with  which  the  Latin-American 
softens  the  perpetration  of  his  most  hilarious,  carnival-time  tricks. 


CHAPTER  XV 


NORTHWARD  TO  BAHIA 


MORE  than  five  months  had  passed  since  my  first  arrival  in  Rio 
when,  in  the  first  days  of  the  new  year,  I  actually  started  on 
my  homeward  way  again.  The  train  from  Nictheroy  north- 
ward left  at  dawn,  after  the  unfailing  Brazilian  habit,  and  I  caught  a 
last  glimpse  of  sunrise  over  Rio  and  its  bay  before  they  passed  finally 
from  my  sight.  The  mountains  of  the  cool  plateau  lay  blue-gray  along 
the  horizon  all  that  day's  ride  through  the  singing  jungle.  The  flat 
littoral  was  considerably  inhabited,  but  chiefly  with  thatched  mud-and- 
reed  huts,  contrasted  only  now  and  then  by  a  massive,  dignified  old 
facenda-house  standing,  like  some  poor  but  still  proud  aristocrat,  on  a 
commanding  knoll  above  broad  reaches  of  flat  corn,  cane,  or  pasture 
lands,  broken  by  frequent  marshes  grown  full  of  the  omnipresent 
vegetation.  At  the  stations  negro  boys  highly  contented  with  life  sold 
melons,  bananas,  mangos,  red  figs,  the  acidulous,  parrot-beaked  caji'i, 
and  little  native  birds  in  tiny  home-made  cages.  The  scream  and  groan 
of  crude  cane-carts  in  the  fields  or  along  the  dust-thick  roads  could 
sometimes  be  heard  above  the  roar  of  the  train.  Rain  had  been  fre- 
quent here  during  the  past  weeks,  but  it  had  ceased  abruptly  at  Christ- 
mas and  the  implacable  sun  had  already  wiped  out  all  evidence  of 
moisture.  At  Macahe  we  came  down  to  the  edge  of  the  sea  again, 
stretching  away  emerald-blue  and  mirror-smooth  to  the  end  of  space, 
then  turning  inland  once  more  across  a  sand-blown  region,  we  de- 
scended at  Campos.  176  miles  north  of  Nictheroy. 

This  second  city  of  the  State  of  Rio  de  Janeiro  is  an  old  and  some- 
what dilapidated  town  well  spread  out  on  the  campo,  or  sea-flat  open 
country,  for  which  it  is  named,  with  a  few  aged  church-towers  peering 
on  tiptoe  over  the  broad  cane-fields  that  surround  it.  Scattered  im- 
perial palms  slightly  shade  it,  and  the  widest  river  I  had  so  far  seen  in 
Brazil  gives  it  a  light-craft  connection  with  the  sea.  Neither  its  mule 
cars  nor  its  medieval  "Hotel  Amazonas,"  with  a  single  hanho  de  chuva, 
or  "rain  bath,"  are  fit  subjects  for  unbounded  praise,  but  at  least  its 
chief  cinema  manager  cut  short  my  professional  labors  by  signing  on  the 

342 


NORTHWARD  TO  BAHIA  343 

dotted  line  as  soon  as  it  was  pointed  out  to  him.  I  left  the  contract  and 
instructions  to  "Tut"  with  the  hotel  runner,  to  be  handed  to  the  tallest 
man  who  arrived  by  train  the  next  Wednesday,  and  fled  on  into  the 
north  by  the  same  conveyance  by  which  1  had  arrived  the  day  before. 

The  difference  between  this  British-owned  line  and  the  government- 
operated  "Central"  was  as  wide  as  that  between  discipline  and  license, 
yet  even  on  this  the  ticket-offices  were  miserable  little  holes  in  the  wall, 
barely  thigh-high;  the  sellers  always  opened  as  late,  and  worked  as 
slowly  and  stupidly  as  possible,  and  it  was  only  by  crouching  like  an  ape 
and  fighting  those  struggling  about  the  ticket-hole  with  trickery,  stealth, 
and  bad  manners  that  the  traveler  could  get  a  chance  to  buy  the  ex- 
orbitant-priced tickets  and  escape  paying  fifty  per  cent,  excess  on  the 
train.  Kilometer-books  are  sold  in  Brazil,  but  they  must  be  taken  to 
the  ticket-window  to  be  stamped  and  audited  and  registered  and  signed 
each  time  the  holder  wishes  to  board  a  train,  hence  nothing  is  to  be 
gained  by  using  them.  The  shadowy,  saw-shaped  range  on  our  left 
followed  us  all  the  blazing,  sand-blown  day,  tantalizing  us  with  sugges- 
tions of  cool  upland  valleys  and  meadows  watered  by  clear,  cold  streams. 
As  the  sun  crawled  round  and  peered  in  at  my  side  of  the  car  the  heat 
grew  unendurable,  in  spite  of  the  electric  fans  which  recalled  the  gov- 
ernment lines  by  contrast,  and  the  dust-filled  air  all  but  refused  to  enter 
the  nostrils.  The  insignificant  stations  were  crowded  with  the  curious 
enjoying  their  chief  daily  diversion,  but  they  were  silent  and  listless 
beneath  the  appalling  heat. 

In  his  "Voyage  of  the  Beagle"  Darwin  speaks  of  seeing  South 
American  ant-hills  twelve  feet  high.  I  had  set  this  down  to  the  exuber- 
ance of  youth,  but  suddenly,  not  far  north  of  Campos,  we  came  upon 
great  fields  of  them,  like  eruptions  on  the  face  of  nature,  mounds  eight. 
ten,  perhaps  even  twelve  feet  high,  but  here  grass-grown,  instead  of 
presenting  the  solid  clay,  cement-like  surface  familiar  elsewhere.  The 
sandy  condition  of  the  soil  evidently  made  it  possible  only  to  pile  them 
up  in  this  oval  form,  so  sharply  contrasting  with  the  usual  sugar-loaf 
shape  of  those  made  of  clay.  In  mid-afternoon  the  flat,  baking,  sea- 
level  littoral  gave  way  to  rolling,  then  hilly  country,  and  we  had  climbed 
to  a  height  of  several  hundred  meters  when  we  passed  from  the  little 
State  of  Rio  de  Janeiro  into  the  equally  tiny  one  of  Espirito  Santo,  for 
here  the  great  plateau  of  central  Brazil  forces  its  way  clear  down  to 
the  edge  of  the  sea.  Time  was  when  the  State  of  Rio  was  enormous, 
but  bit  by  bit,  during  the  eighteenth  century,  there  was  lopped  ofif  from 
it  the  much  larger  states  of   Sao  Paulo,  Minas  Geraes,  Goyaz,  and 


344  WORKING  NORTH  FROIM  PATAGONIA 

finally  Matto  Grosso,  until  to-day  the  population  within  its  limits — 
which  do  not  include  the  federal  district  and  national  capital — is  esti- 
mated at  little  more  than  one  fifth  that  of  the  old  mining  province, 
vastly  less  than  that  of  Sao  Paulo  and  Bahia,  and  with  Rio  Grande  do 
Sul  and  Pernambuco  also  outdistancing  it. 

Coflfee-clad  hills  and  a  reddish  soil  gave  Espirito  Santo  a  slight  re- 
semblance to  Sao  Paulo,  though  most  of  it  was  dense-green  with  heavy 
timber,  through  which  a  howling  wind-and-rain  storm  came  raging 
toward  sunset.  We  halted  for  the  night  in  Cachoeira  do  Itapemirim, 
so  called  for  the  cachoeira,  or  rapids  over  a  series  of  rocks  in  the  Ita- 
pemirim, the  sound  of  which  deadened  our  footfalls  all  the  way  from 
the  station  to  the  "Hotel  Toledo"  on  the  tiny  main  square.  It  was  little 
more  than  a  barefoot  village  in  the  bush,  but  the  show  would  be  forced 
to  spend  a  night  there — nay,  two  nights,  for  it  would  arrive  on  Satur- 
day— and  I  soon  added  to  my  collection  the  signature  of  the  "Turk" 
who,  in  addition  to  a  little  cloth-shop  and  billiard-and-liquor-room, 
owned  a  miniature  cinema  jutting  far  out  over  the  rocky  river. 

Relieved  of  the  feeling  that  the  show  was  treading  on  my  heels,  I  let 
the  morning  train  go  on  without  me  and  settled  down  to  make  up  the 
sleep  I  was  in  arrears.  Four  or  five  hours  slumber  out  of  each  twenty- 
four  may  be  all  very  well  for  an  Edison,  but  commonplace  mortals 
require  more.  Not  only  was  the  hotel  as  quiet  and  bucolic  as  the  town 
itself,  but  it  had  "beds  of  wire";  both  heat  and  mosquitoes  were  con- 
spicuous by  their  absence ;  the  never-ceasing  music  of  the  cachoeira  was 
calming  to  the  nerves,  and  if  I  ever  did  wake  up  there  were  horses  to 
hire  for  a  jaunt  through  the  surrounding  country.  Moreover,  the  town 
and  vicinity  were  the  scene  of  one  of  Brazil's  most  famous  novels, 
"Chanaan"  by  Graca  Aranha  of  the  Brazilian  Academy,  and  just 
then  Minister  to  The  Hague — though  the  town  itself  was  supremely 
ignorant  of  its  celebrity  the  world  round  in  the  dozen  languages  into 
which  the  tale  has  been  translated.  Even  the  local  editor  had  never 
heard  of  it,  though  he  did  know  the  author,  "because  I  am  obliged  to 
know  all  Brazilian  diplomats." 

The  animal  that  was  intrusted  to  me  for  a  modest  consideration  next 
afternoon  could  scarcely  have  been  called  a  horse,  though  it  resembled 
even  less  any  other  known  quadruped,  as  the  wooden  frame  thinly 
covered  with  leather  and  hung  with  two  iron  rings  into  which  I  could 
barely  insert  the  ends  of  my  toes  must  perhaps  be  called  a  saddle  for 
want  of  a  more  exact  term.  By  dint  of  reducing  my  right  arm  to 
paralysis  I  succeeded  in  forcing  the  torpid  brute  up  and  down  the  few 


NORTHWARD  TO  BAHIA  345 

streets  of  the  village  and  out  one  of  the  roads  that  wander  off  as  trails 
through  the  plump,  dense-wooded  hills  about  it.  But  it  would  have  been 
as  speedy  and  far  more  comfortable  to  have  walked,  or  better  still,  per- 
haps, not  to  have  gcme  at  all,  for  we  were  overtaken  and  imprisoned  by 
one  of  those  raging  storms  for  which  this  region  seems  famous.  Im- 
mense banks  of  snow-white  clouds  far  off  on  the  horizon  completely  en- 
circled us  when  we  set  out,  yet  so  benign  was  their  appearance  that  I 
scarcely  noticed  them,  except  as  a  detail  of  the  charming  landscape, 
until  suddenly  they  swept  in  from  all  sides  at  express  speed,  getting 
blacker  and  ever  blacker,  until  the  entire  sky  was  wiped  out  and  the 
sullen  growls  of  thunder  grew  to  violent  outbursts  of  anger  that  deafen- 
ed the  ears  like  an  artillery  barrage,  while  the  wind  tore  at  the  trees 
and  bamboo  groves  as  if  it  would  uproot  not  only  them  but  the  sheer 
stone  "sugar-loaf"  near  which  the  storm  had  found  us.  With  the  help 
of  two  negro  boys  on  muleback  and  the  butt  of  my  heavy  native  whip  I 
urged  the  equine  caricature  into  a  lame  and  ludicrous  gallop  and 
reached  the  edge  of  town  before  I  was  wholly  drenched,  taking  refuge 
in  a  half-finished  building.  A  negro  boy  sleeping  on  a  narrow  plank 
high  above  the  still  unbearded  floor  said  he  was  not  ill ;  evidently  he  was 
just  lying  there  to  let  the  day  get  by  so  that  he  could  sleep  through  the 
night  and  then  take  a  good  rest  to-morrow.  I  could  only  get  the  head 
of  the  alleged  horse  under  shelter,  but  it  was  evident  that  he  had  stood 
out  in  many  worse  storms  than  mere  wind  and  rain  ;  and  there  I  squatted 
for  three  mortal  hours,  chiding  myself  for  not  having  put  a  bit  of  read- 
ing matter  in  my  pocket.  I  might  have  read  the  negro  boy,  I  suppose, 
but  he  looked  like  a  primer,  just  such  a  crude  and  simple  volume  as 
makes  up  the  whole  human  library  of  Cachoeira  do  Itapemirim. 

Another  all-day  train-ride  of  little  more  than  a  hundred  miles 
brought  me  to  Victoria,  capital  of  the  State  of  Holy  Ghost,  or,  more 
exactly,  to  a  little  backwoods  station  on  the  opposite  side  of  the  long 
narrow  arm  of  the  sea  on  which  the  capital  is  situated.  So  placid  was 
this,  and  so  cool  the  weather  after  a  heavy  rain,  that  I  had  to  taste  it 
as  we  were  being  rowed  across  before  I  could  believe  that  we  were  down 
at  sea-level  again.  It  was  an  easy-going,  less  aggressive  capital  than 
those  farther  south,  and  its  prices  were  so  nearly  reasonable  that  I 
grew  bold  and  marched  into  the  new  and  showy  four-story  "Palace 
Hotel"  on  the  waterfront.  The  "brutal  crisis"  had  dealt  Victoria  an 
almost  deadly  blow.  There  was  not  a  show  in  town,  except  a  free 
cinema  in  the  liquor  emporium  of  the  little  French  electric  tramway 
company  that  sends  its  cars  wandering  along  the  waterfront  for  miles 


346  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

in  both  directions.  On  one  of  these  I  gradually  worked  my  way  out 
to  the  home  of  the  "colonel"  who  owned  the  imposing  theater — and 
found  that  he  had  passed  me  on  the  way  in.  I  hurried  back  to  town — 
if  that  verb  may  be  used  in  the  same  sentence  with  Victoria's  street-car 
service — and  found  that  the  "colonel"  had  gone  out  home  again.  But 
by  sternly  overcoming  adverse  fate  and  the  fatalistic  indifference  of 
those  accustomed  to  hang  around  the  theater  I  finally  had  him  hunted 
up,  a  heavy,  middle-aged,  over-courteous  mulatto,  as  was  also  his  man- 
ager and,  for  that  matter,  almost  every  conspicuous  citizen  in  town. 
Having  impressed  upon  them  the  extraordinary  good  fortune  that  was 
soon  to  descend  upon  Victoria,  I  went  home  to  dinner,  telling  them  to 
think  it  over.  Their  theater,  like  two  former  cinemas  in  town,  had 
been  closed  since  the  first  month  of  the  war ;  they  had  so  completely  lost 
heart  that  they  were  not  even  having  films  shipped  to  them  any  more, 
and  felt  that  it  would  be  impossible  to  get  up  a  show.  I  assured  them 
that  wherever  the  Kinetophone  landed  there  must  be  a  show,  and  within 
half  an  hour  had  them  worked  up  to  such  enthusiasm  that  instead  of 
accepting  my  suggestion  that  we  play  Monday  and  Tuesday  and  sail  for 
Bahia  on  Wednesday,  they  were  imploring  me  to  book  for  a  solid  week. 

This  having  been  done,  the  manager  and  I  made  polite  and  diplomatic 
calls  on  the  editors  of  Victoria's  two  pitiful  little  dailies  of  four  fool- 
scap pages  each,  more  than  half  taken  up  with  advertising  and  the  rest 
with  large-type  "news"  consisting  mainly  of  birthday  greetings  to  "our 
most  influential  citizens."  Neither  of  the  apathetic  pseudo-journalists 
caught  even  a  hint  of  the  news  value  of  Edison's  part  in  the  affair,  but 
they  did  waste  many  words  in  giving  a  full  account  of  the  "delightful 
courtesy"  which  "Dr.  Franck,"  and  the  distinguished  and  much-titled 
fellow-citizen  who  brought  him,  had  shown  in  visiting  them. 

Victoria  was  one  of  the  old  settlements  of  the  Portuguese  crown 
when  what  afterward  came  to  be  known  as  Brazil  was  given  out  in 
capitanias,  having  been  founded  nearly  four  centuries  ago  on  the  island 
of  Sao  Antonio.  It  may  have  15,000  inhabitants  in  all  the  coves  and 
corners  of  rocks  among  which  it  is  scattered,  but  it  is  essentially  an 
unimportant,  if  picturesque,  village.  The  nucleus  of  the  town  is  well 
inland  along  the  narrow,  river-like  little  roadstead,  with  a  yellow  presi- 
dential palace  and  some  other  buildings  of  size,  but  it  is  made  up  chiefly 
of  one-story  buildings  quickly  running  down  to  huts.  There  are  a  few 
coffee  houses  that  export,  and  a  few  stores  that  supply  the  interior,  but 
for  the  most  part  Victoria  lives  on  government  salaries — when  condi- 
tions are  such  that  these  can  be  paid.     How  backward  it  is  may  be 


Hcggars  ot  Bahia,  backed  by  some-  of  our  advertisements 


A  family  of  Bahia.  and  a  familiar  domestic  chore 


NORTHWARD  TO  BAHIA  347 

guessed  from  the  fact  that  negro  coffee-porters  have  not  yet  been 
(Liven  out  by  whites,  and  that  it  is  the  outpost  of  the  reign  of  hammocks 
which  covers  all  northern  Brazil,  at  least  half  the  population  seeming  to 
spend  their  days  swinging  back  and  forth  inside  the  baked  mud  kennels 
they  call  home.  An  ancient  fort  in  ruins  and  the  clustered  sanctuary  of 
Nossa  Senhora  da  Penha  in  a  striking  site  on  the  summit  of  a  stone  hill, 
with  the  usual  collection  of  wax  and  pictured  proofs  of  miracles  that 
have  been  wrought  here  since  1769,  are  the  main  sights  of  interest. 
For  the  ocean  is  not  visible  until  one  has  walked — or,  if  time  is  no 
object,  taken  the  tramway— for  miles  out  through  little  groves  of 
plump,  rosy-cheeked  mangos  and  along  the  single  street  from  which 
most  of  Victoria  sprawls  and  scrambles  up  the  rocky,  half-wooded  hills 
along  her  waterway  to  her  huts  perched  among  huge,  blackish  granite 
rocks.  Then,  when  the  calm,  boatless  sea  and  the  labyrinthian  harbor 
entrance  bursts  forth  at  last  from  the  long,  narrow,  yellow  beach  out  to 
which  the  cars  eventually  stagger,  there  is  not  a  glimpse  left  of  the 
town  itself,  hidden  away  among  its  wet-green  hills. 

"Tut,"  Carlos,  and  the  show  arrived  on  time  and  were  eventually 
coaxed  through  the  red  tape  that  entangles  any  state  capital  and  loaded 
into  the  canoa,  or  mammoth  log  turned  into  a  boat,  of  the  German  who 
reigned  in  Victoria  as  the  American  Consul.  This  w^as  gradually  rowed, 
not  directly  to  the  theater,  but  to  the  "American's"  wharf,  where  we 
were  forced  to  hire  a  wagon  and  lose  an  hour  to  cover  the  hundred 
yards  remaining.  We  were  installed,  however,  in  time  to  give  the  two 
sections  as  advertised — though  the  managers  were  so  skeptical  of  my 
solemn  promise  that  they  would  certainly  have  postponed  the  opening 
date  had  I  not  been  on  the  ground  to  forbid  it— and  were  deluged  by 
such  a  mob  of  pleasure-seekers  that  we  had  to  close  the  doors  and  hold 
hundreds  of  them  back  until  the  second  section. 

Next  day  the  agent  of  a  local  steamship  line  came  to  the  theater  and 
measured  all  our  trunks,  arranging  to  send  the  whole  outfit  to  Bahia 
the  following  Monday  for  about  one-tenth  what  train-travel  had  led  us 
to  expect.  For  I  had  come  at  last  to  a  break  in  the  railroads  up  the 
cast  coast  of  South  America  and  was  forced  to  take  to  the  sea  for  the 
first  time  since  Hays  and  I  had  entered  the  continent  at  Cartagena. 
Colombia,  two  and  a  half  years  before.  On  Wednesday  "Tut"  and  I 
took  our  last  Victorian  stroll — the  negro  boys  along  the  way  halting 
open-mouthed  and  gazing  up  and  down  him  to  see  where  he  was  spliced 
— and  in  the  afternoon  I  boarded  the  Maranhao  of  the  Lloyd-Brazil- 
eiro  and  settled  ^own  in  my  cabin.     I  had  dropped  into  a  Brazilian 


348  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

novel  of  colonial  days  and  completely  forgotten  the  life  of  the  harbor 
and  the  little  capital  that  was  still  crawling  slowly  on  about  us,  when  I 
was  suddenly  astonished  to  see  standing  before  me  the  owner  and 
manager  of  the  theater.  Those  two  stodgy,  bashful,  rather  artless 
mulattoes  had  hired  a  boat  and  taken  the  time  and  trouble  to  come  out 
on  board  to  bid  me  the  good-by,  which  I,  in  my  American  incivility,  had 
completely  forgotten.  One  after  the  other  they  gave  me  the  fraternal 
South  American  embrace  of  a  handshake  and  an  affectionate  patting 
on  the  back  with  the  left  hand,  assuring  me  that  the  show  would 
be  run  with  as  great  care  and  our  percentage  as  honestly  computed  as 
if  I  were  there  in  person,  that  they  w^ould  see  to  it  that  my  entire 
"company"  boarded  the  Monday  steamer,  and  bade  me  be  sure  to  stop 
and  see  them  if  ever  I  came  that  way  again.  The  most  steel -rimmed 
color-line  could  not  but  be  joggled  by  such  Brazilian  amiability. 

On  the  second  morning  thereafter,  with  no  other  incident  than  being 
halted  and  examined  by  British  cruisers  hidden  among  the  Abrolhos 
Islands  in  Brazilian  waters,  the  Maranhao  slipped  smoothly  into  the  im- 
mense Bay  of  All  Saints,  specks  of  white  sails  dotting  its  blue  im- 
mensity, distant  land  with  low  hills  gradually  spreading  along  all  the 
port  horizon,  and  when  I  chanced  to  look  up  again  the  City  of  Sao 
Salvador  da  Bahia  was  gazing  down  upon  us  from  the  ridge  along  which 
it  stretches  for  mile  after  hazy  mile. 

"Colonel"  Ruben  Pinheiro  Guimaraes  was  manager  of  the  principal 
playhouse  in  Bahia.  The  ancient  "Sao  Joao,"  imperial  theater  when 
Portuguese  viceroys  ruled  Brazil,  still  kept  much  of  its  stateliness  in 
spite  of  being  rather  unkempt  and  disreputable  after  more  than  a  cen- 
tury of  constant  use.  In  situation  it  takes  second  place  to  no  other  in 
the  world,  sitting  out  on  the  nose  of  the  upper  city,  where  to  step  off 
its  esplanade  would  be  to  fall  hundreds  of  feet  down  to  the  business 
section  below,  and  gazing  away  across  the  bay  to  the  utmost  limits  of 
the  ocean  horizon.  Ruben,  a  Paulista  of  unbroken  Portuguese  ancestry, 
had  the  reputation  of  being  somewhat  related  in  business  matters  to  the 
eel  family ;  but  there  is  a  certain  pleasure  in  flirting  with  possible  fraud, 
as  with  any  other  kind  of  danger.  It  was  not  until  eight  at  night,  how- 
ever, that  I  got  his  name  signed  to  a  "split-even"  contract  for  twenty- 
five  days,  fifteen  of  them  in  the  theaters  of  Bahia  and  ten  in  towns 
about  the  bay. 

Unfortunately  Sao  Salvador  da  Bahia  was  not  an  ideal  place  to  settle 
down.  For  one  thing,  it  had  a  new  style  in  hotels.  Elsewhere  in 
Brazil  they  had  been  questionable,  here  they  were  not  in  the  least  so, 


NORTHWARD  TO  BAHIA  349 

for  not  one  of  them  pretended  to  be  anything  but  what  it  was,— full  of 
frousy  females  who  had  not  even  the  virtue  of  being  young  or  good- 
looking,  hags  on  the  last  rung  of  the  ladder  that  leads  from  concubinage 
in  Europe  through  street-walking  in  Rio  down  to  the  gutter  of  pander- 
ing to  the  chiefly  African  rouees  of  Bahia.  Even  as  hotels  they  were  the 
worst  imaginable,  yet  high-priced  at  that,  and  with  adventurous  women 
from  foreign  parts  assigned  to  every  other  room  and  constantly  hanging 
out  the  windows  one  had  the  edifying  sensation  of  living  in  a  brothel. 

The  hotel  I  was  finally  compelled  to  endure  looked  out  across  the 
marvelous  bay,  upon  the  "Sao  Joao,"  and  down  the  wide  stone-paved 
street  leading  from  the  upper  to  the  lower  town.  Up  this  snorted  huge 
motor-trucks  loaded  with  meat  from  the  abattoirs,  straining  automobiles, 
and  an  unending  procession  of  those  citizens  of  Bahia  who  found  it 
cheaper  to  walk  than  to  squander  the  tostdo  it  costs  to  be  lifted  from 
the  lower  to  the  upper  level.  Great  quantities  of  freight  also  ascended 
or  descended  on  foot.  A  trunk  or  two,  with  perhaps  a  valise  on  top, 
often  came  noiselessly  marching  up  the  steep  street  on  negro  heads; 
bedsteads,  bird-cages,  bureaus  and  all  other  forms  of  furniture,  fruit 
in  baskets  or  without,  bunches  of  bananas  laid  flat  on  a  frizzled  pate, 
chickens  with  their  legs  tied  and  panting  in  the  roasting  sun,  every 
known  and  nameable  article  that  cannot  cave  in  an  African  skull  moved 
by  what  is  still  the  cheapest  form  of  transportation  in  Bahia,  even  in 
this  century  of  steam  and  electricity. 

The  former  capital  and  oldest  city  of  Brazil  takes  its  popular  name — 
the  offtcial  and  correct  one  is  Sao  Salvador — from  the  immense  bay  on 
which  it  is  situated — the  bay  which  from  anywhere  in  the  upper  town 
stretches  away  in  deepest  indigo-blue,  everywhere  dotted  with  specks 
of  white  sails,  to  the  low  ridges  of  hills,  faint  with  distance,  that  all  but 
surround  it.  In  some  ways  it  has  a  finer  setting  than  that  of  Rio, 
though  it  is  not  so  strikingly,  so  dramatically,  beautiful,  and  the  old 
capital  has  the  advantage  over  the  new  that  almost  constant  trade  winds 
sweep  across  it.  Bahia  is  built  in  two  stories,  that  at  sea-level  being  at 
most  a  few  blocks  deep  and  often  thinning  down  to  a  single  row  of 
buildings.  "O  Commercio"  the  Bahianos  call  this  lower  part,  and  it  is 
almost  exclusively  a  business  section,  perhaps  the  only  spot  in  South 
America  that  resembles  lower  New  York  in  being  silent  and  uninhabited 
at  night,  with  only  a  few  watchmen  and  belated  pedestrians  treading 
the  dimly  gas-lighted  streets. 

The  upper  town  is  reached  either  by  a  hard  climb  up  the  stone-paved 
roadway,  by  an  American  elevator  of  sixteen-person  capacity,  or  by  a 


350  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

steeply  inclined  cable  railway  with  single  cars.  Hotels,  stores,  theaters, 
almost  everything  except  the  wharves,  wholesale  business,  and  the  main 
market-place,  are  on  the  upper  level.  Nearly  every  building  dates  back 
to  colonial  days  and  many  of  the  old  houses  are  in  splendid  situations, 
perched  on  the  edge  of  the  ridge  at  the  very  base  of  which  lies  the  im- 
mense bay.  But  they  are  taken  up  almost  entirely  by  the  descendants 
of  slaves,  with  the  accumulated  uncleanliness  of  generations,  and  the 
while  minority  of  Bahia  has  been  driven  to  the  often  less  attractive 
suburbs.  The  upper  and  main  part  of  the  town  is  built  chiefly  on  two 
ridges,  facing  the  sea  and  the  bay  respectively  and  in  many  places 
falling  sheer  into  them.  On  their  tops  the  ridges  are  thickly  inhabited, 
and  the  streets  crisscross  in  an  effort  to  conform  to  the  irregular  lay  of 
the  land,  but  every  now  and  then  they  disappear  through  wooded  lanes 
into  hilly  virgin  forests  with  innumerable  huge  trees, — the  mammoth 
aguacatc,  thickly  hung  with  alligator-pears,  the  intense  green  dome- 
shaped  mango,  most  perfect  shade-tree  of  the  tropics,  and  here  and  there 
palm-trees  standing  haughtily  above  all  else— for  the  rolling  ridges  are 
often  broken  with  deep  valleys  in  which  negro  huts  congregate. 

It  would  be  beneath  the  dignity,  as  well  as  contrary  to  the  languid 
temperament,  of  Bahia  to  take  a  census,  but  at  the  popular  Brazilian 
pastime  of  guessing  statistics  the  city  professes  to  have  about  one  third 
of  a  million  inhabitants ;  there  is  no  question  that  it  is  the  third  city  in 
size  in  Brazil.  Of  that  number  certainly  eight  out  of  ten  are  negroes, 
a  majority  of  them  full-blooded,  with  all  the  traits  their  ancestors 
brought  with  them  from  the  African  bush,  plus  the  faults  of  their 
Portuguese-Brazilian  neighbors.  Except  for  the  two  or  three  elite 
sections,  such  as  that  along  the  summit  of  the  second  ridge,  there  is 
scarcely  a  corner  of  Bahia  in  which  one  cannot  stroll  an  hour  or  more 
and  never  see  any  but  a  black  face— with  the  single  exception  that  even 
in  the  most  African  quarters  the  shops  are  almost  invariably  kept  by 
Portuguese,  pasty-white  of  complexion,  whether  because  of  the  sed- 
entary indoor  lives  they  lead  or  because  of  the  contrast  to  the  sea  of 
blacks  about  them.  One  soon  comes  to  know  every  white  face  in 
Bahia,  even  those  with  Caucasian  ancestry  enough  to  be  individually 
distinguishable,  so  fiequently  does  one  notice  them  in  the  business 
streets,  theaters,  street-cars,  and  more  pretentious  cafes. 

More  slaves  were  brought  to  the  province  of  Bahia  than  to  any  other 
of  Brazil,  not  only  because  the  planting  of  sugar  and  tobacco  required 
much  labor  but  because  this  part  of  Portuguese  America  was  earliest 
settled.     The  original  settlers  from  overseas  were  too  proud  to  work; 


NORTHWARD  TO  BAH  I A  35 1 

the  negroes  they  brought  over  to  work  for  them  were  emancipated  and 
also  refused  to  work,  crowding  into  town  to  Hve  on  what  they  could 
pick  up  between  their  incessant  native  dances  and  church  festivals,  so 
that  we  have  the  edifying  spectacle  of  an  immense  state,  ix)ssessmg  un- 
limited natural  resources,  virtually  bankrupt.  It  is  said  that  the  old 
colonial  life,  the  old-time  somnolence,  Brazil  as  she  was  in  the  olden 
days,  is  still  best  seen  in  Bahia.  H  so,  I  am  glad  that  my  Brazilian 
journey  came  at  a  later  date.  Compared  with  the  old  capital,  Rio  seems 
little  more  than  a  quadroon  city,  and  few  negroes  among  many  whites 
is  plainly  better  for  the  negro  than  to  be  surrounded  on  all  sides  by  bad 
examples  of  his  own  race. 

The  negroes  are  so  numerous  and  so  sluggish  in  their  movements 
that  unless  one  would  be  jostled  at  every  turn  one  can  travel  the  streets 
only  by  stepping  out  of  their  way.  They  lie  on  every  corner  and  in 
every  gutter;  they  loll,  blocking  the  streets,  in  every  shaded  spot,  on 
every  threshold— wearing  a  few  rags,  yet  often  with  a  crude  native 
cigar  protruding  from  their  thick  lips,  irrespective  of  sex,  for  Bahia  is 
Brazil's  tobacco  center  and  "fumo"  is  cheap — negroes,  negroes  every- 
where, until  they  swim  in  black  specks  before  the  eyes  when  one  closes 
them.  It  is  another  amusing  example  of  the  pseudo-civilization  of 
South  America  that  in  the  upper  town  the  police  will  stop  any  man  in 
full  comfortable  dress  of  summer  who  wears  no  coat,  while  negroes 
and  even  a  few  poor  whites  parade  anywhere  in  a  ragged,  unbuttoned 
jacket  without  the  suggestion  of  shirt  or  undershirt  beneath  it  and 
barely  enough  suggestion  of  trousers  to  save  them  from  complete 
nudity. 

The  negroes  of  Bahia  speak  Portuguese  much  as  those  of  our  south- 
ern states  do  English.  In  their  mouths  noite  becomes  "noitche,"  muito 
is  "muitcho,"  senhor  is  "  'nhor,"  and  "  'nha"  may  mean  either  senhora 
or  scnhoras.  How  much  of  his  Latin  garrulousness  the  negro  has 
caught  from  living  with  that  race  and  how  much  his  ancestors  brought 
him  from  the  Dark  Continent  is  an  interesting  question.  I  do  not  be- 
lieve the  native  African  chatters  with  such  a  flow  of  words  and  gestures 
as  are  to  be  seen  in  any  black  gathering  in  Bahia.  The  cheerfulness 
and  hilarious  gaiety  for  which  the  race  is  noted  stands  out  clearly  in  the 
general  temperament  of  the  old  capital ;  while  the  Car'wca  is  the  gloom- 
iest and  most  suicidal  of  Brazilians,  the  Bahiano  rarely  shows  either 
tendency. 

Down  in  the  swarming  market-place  in  the  lower  town  powerful 
negroes  of  both  sexes — the  most  splendid  physical  specimens  in  Brazil 


352  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

are  the  blacks — lie  languidly  about,  hoping  to  sell  a  few  cents'  worth  of 
something, — pineapples,  melons,  mangos,  sapotes,  lemons,  huge  alligator- 
pears  at  a  cent  each,  the  blushing  cajit,  the  jaca,  or  jack-fruit,  which 
grows  to  watermelon  size  on  the  trunks  of  trees  and  has  a  white  meat 
so  coarse  that  it  is  eaten  only  by  negroes ;  bread-nuts  and  bread-fruit, 
bananas,  rosaries  of  what  seem  to  be  shelled  but  unroasted  peanuts, 
small  oranges,  green  in  color — for  though  there  are  fine  big  seedless 
ones  in  Bahia  this  was  not  the  season  for  them — and  every  other  known 
fruit  of  tropical  America,  except  a  few  native  only  to  the  Amazon 
region.  Here  one  may  have  a  coco  molle  gelado,  in  other  words,  iced 
milk  of  green  cocoanut,  than  which  there  is  no  better  way  of  quenching 
tropical  thirst;  here  one  may  even  find  a  man  who,  as  a  last  resort 
against  starvation,  will  almost  be  willing  to  work,  at  least  to  the  extent 
of  carrying  away  on  his  head  anything  less  than  a  grand  piano  or  the 
heavier  makes  of  automobiles.  Many  copper  coins,  virtually  unknown 
in  the  rest  of  Brazil,  are  used  in  the  markets  of  Bahia, — vintems  and 
double  vintems,  or  twenty  and  forty-reis  pieces — and  the  negroes  still 
make  their  computations  in  the  old  colonial  terms.  In  Bahiano  market 
dialect  a  tncia-pataca  is  i8o  reis  and  a  pataca  twice  that,  though  there 
are  no  actual  coins  of  those  denominations.  Nickel,  in  one  hundred 
reis  pieces  and  higher,  is  too  valuable  for  most  negro  transactions.  As 
they  say  in  Bahia,  with  a  black  it  is  "inntem  pa  cachaza,  vinteni  pa' 
farinha,  e  prompto!"  (a  copper  for  rum,  a  copper  for  mandioca  meal, 
and  enough ! )  He  will  not  work  again  until  he  must  have  more  cachasa 
and  farinha.  Whenever  any  real  work  is  required,  such  as  the  digging 
of  sewers,  paving  of  streets,  or  laying  of  street  car  tracks,  gangs  of 
white  Europeans  have  to  be  shipped  in  to  do  it. 

Yet  sometimes  it  is  hard  to  blame  the  negro  if  he  just  lies  in  the 
shade  and  a  soft  breeze  and  gazes  away  at  the  beautiful  bay,  indigo- 
blue  by  day,  shimmering  with  moonlight  by  night,  ever  fresh  with  the 
breezes  that  lightly  ruffle  its  ocean-like  bosom,  as  if  he  were  making  up 
for  the  loafing  denied  his  enslaved  fathers.  After  all,  if  Nature  wished 
man  to  exert  himself,  vdiy  does  it  produce  such  perfect  weather  and 
cause  bananas  and  jack-fruit  to  grow  of  themselves?  The  languid 
picturesqueness  of  Bahia  is  best  personified  in  the  typical  Bahiana, 
black  or  near-black  in  color,  wearing  many  bracelets  and  similar  orna- 
ments of  tin  and  wire,  sometimes  gilded,  her  immense  hips  heavy  with 
bulky  skirts  only  a  trifle  less  gay  in  color  than  her  waist,  shawl,  and 
turban,  placidly  smoking  a  big  native  cigar  and  carrying  on  her  head  a 
small  stool  or  a  tiny  table,  legs-up  like  a  helpless  turtle,  with  perhaps 


NORTHWARD  TO  BAHIA  353 

a  closed  umbrella  lying  flat  on  top  of  that,  on  her  way  to  squat  on  the 
one  and  lean  on  or  raise  the  other  in  church  or  market.  If  she  has  only 
a  single  banana  with  her,  the  Bahiana  will  carry  it  on  her  head  rather 
than  by  hand.  I  have  seen  the  ancient  anecdote  of  the  negro-girl  ser- 
vant given  a  letter  to  post,  who  put  it  on  her  he'id  and  laid  a  stone  on 
top  to  keep  it  from  blowing  away,  duplicated  in  the  streets  of  Bahia. 
Racial  languor,  however,  gives  way  to  passionate  activity  when  some 
black  troubadour  takes  to  thrumming  his  guitar  and  singing  modinlias 
and  chorados.  These  popular  ballads  of  Brazil,  especially  of  Bahia  and 
Pernambuco,  mixtures  of  the  moda  and  fado  of  Portugal  and  of  the 
tribal  rites  of  savage  Africa,  are  childish  in  thought  and  monotonous 
of  rhythm,  weird,  languishing,  half-wild  songs,  often  improvised  by  the 
unlettered  troubadours  and  accompanied  by  sensual  dances  and  strange 
African  movements  of  the  body  into  which  the  whole  negro  throng 
gradually  merges,  discarding  all  remnants  of  their  second-hand  civili- 
zation. 

With  such  an  electorate  it  is  scarcely  to  be  expected  that  Bahia 
should  swarm  with  honest  politicians.  Indeed,  it  is  frankly  admitted 
that  elections  there  are  so  corrupt  that  few  bother  to  go  to  the  polls  and 
take  part  in  what  the  native  papers  refer  to  as  "our  electoral  farce," 
knowing  that  the  votes  cast  have  nothing  whatever  to  do  with  the  result, 
which  the  government  in  power  fixes  beforehand.  Graft  and  mis- 
government  are  acknowledged  to  be  worse  than  in  Rio.  Yet  on  the 
surface  there  is  the  usual  Latin-American  polish.  The  scavengers  of 
Bahia  had  not  been  paid  a  cent  in  months,  yet  the  municipality  was 
building  a  "palace"  in  which  a  single  staircase  cost  400,ooo$ooo !  A 
year  before  my  arrival  a  delegation  from  the  Boston  Chamber  of  Com- 
merce had  landed  at  Bahia  on  a  water-edge  tour  of  South  America, 
were  brought  ashore  in  a  magnificent  launch  "at  the  city's  expense," 
and  treated  with  such  tropical  generosity  that  their  letters  to  home  news- 
papers bubbled  over  with  praises  of  the  wonderful  hospitality  of 
Bahia.  Agostinho  Manoel  de  Jesus,  owner  of  the  launch  in  which  they 
had  landed,  was  still  going  daily  to  the  city  treasury  asking  in  vain  for 
his  money. 

Bahia  was  said  to  be  the  only  place  left  in  Brazil  where  bubonic 
plague  and  yellow  fever  still  persisted.  It  could  hardly  be  otherwise 
with  rats  running  up  and  down  every  pipe,  with  every  opening,  corner, 
or  slightly  out  of  the  way  place  covered  with  accumulated  filth,  and 
with  sanitary  arrangements  almost  everywhere  in  the  old  town  quite 
beyond  the  descriptive  powers  of  Boccaccio.     In  contrast,  great  placards 


354  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

and  posters  everywhere,  bearing  the  heading  "Directoria  Geral  de  Saude 
Publica"  (General  Directory  of  Public  Health)  strive  to  carry  out  the 
bluff  that  the  town  boasts  a  system  of  sanitation.  Even  the  highest 
priced  hotel  would  be  instantly  condemned  in  any  civilized  city ;  the  con- 
ditions in  which  the  vast  majority  of  the  population  live  are  beyond 
any  imagination.  During  the  preceding  April  thirty-five  members  of 
the  foreign  colony,  almost  one  third  of  it  and  including  the  English 
pastor,  had  died  of  yellow  fever,  which  was  expected  to  begin  again 
with  the  rains.  Yet  my  hotel  furnished  no  mosquito  net  and  I  awoke 
each  morning  bitten  in  a  dozen  places — and  any  Brazilian  will  tell  you 
that  only  white  foreigners  take  yellow  fever.  In  compensation  only 
natives,  and  chiefly  negroes,  die  of  the  equally  prevalent  bubonic  plague. 
The  federal  government  offered  to  send  to  Bahia  the  man  who  disin- 
fected Rio,  but  the  state  government  haughtily  replied  that  they  were 
quite  capable  of  cleaning  up  the  place  themselves,  and  meanwhile  sud- 
den death  continues  to  flourish. 

On  my  first  Sunday  in  Bahia  one  of  her  innumerable  festas  was  at 
its  height,  that  of  "Nosso  Senhor  do  Bomfim,"  a  miracle-producing* 
shrine  of  great  popularity  among  the  negroes.  On  Saturday  night  the 
street  cars  in  that  direction  were  so  crowded  that  I  could  not  even 
hang  on.  Bands  of  negroes  carrying  Japanese  lanterns,  singing,  beat- 
ing drums,  tamborines,  and  tin  cans,  marched  in  almost  constant  pro- 
cession past  my  window  dov/n  to  the  lower  city  and  on  out  to  Bomfim, 
a  section  of  town  three  miles  away  around  the  harbor,  the  electric- 
lighted  fagade  of  its  miracle  church  standing  forth  from  the  night  like 
a  monument  to  the  ignorance,  squalor,  and  hunger  of  Bahia.  From 
midnight  on  the  throngs  were  even  thicker,  frequently  waking  me  with 
their  maudlin  din,  for  the  festival  of  Bomfim  is  especially  an  all-night 
affair,  with  much  drinking  and  worse.  On  Sunday  afternoon  I  went 
out  to  the  scene  of  the  festivities.  There  were  thirty  persons  in  the 
street-car,  of  whom  two  were  white.  On  the  climb  up  the  hill  to  the 
church  the  way  was  flanked  by  two  unbroken  rows  of  beggars,  lame, 
halt,  blind,  twisted,  deformed,  degenerate  monstrosities,  idiots  of  all 
degrees  and  every  percentage  of  African  blood,  every  imaginable  horror 
in  human  form,  and  just  plain  nigger  loafers,  all  holding  out  their  hands, 
or  whatever  they  had  left  in  place  of  them,  in  constant  appeal. 

The  church  itself  was  so  packed  that  I  could  only  enter  by  climbing 
the  stairs  to  a  small  side-gallery  and  look  down  upon  an  unbroken  sea 
of  black  faces,  wrapt  up  in  what  sounded  like  a  medieval  Catholic 
service    translated    into    African    voodooism.      Among   the    schemes 


NORTHWARD  TO  BAHIA  355 

concocted  by  the  swarming  priests  of  Bahia  is  one  that  shows  the  sug- 
gestion of  originality.  At  the  huge  church  and  monastery  of  Sao 
Antonio  the  faithful  can  buy,  at  a  milreis  each,  special  stamps  designed 
by  the  priests,  with  which  to  write  to  St.  Anthony  in  Heaven,  and  be 
assured  of  a  direct  auswer  from  him — through  his  priestly  agents  on 
earth,  of  course — on  any  subject. 

"Lots  of  churches  in  Bahia,"  I  remarked  conversationally  to  the  white 
Bahiano  beside  whom  I  stood  watching  the  riot  of  gambling,  drinking, 
and  indecency  about  the  home  of  "miracles." 

"Oh,  not  out  here,"  he  apologized.  "Here  there  is  only  Nosso  Sen- 
hor  do  Bomfim,  and  Sao  Antonio,"  and  Sao  This  and  Sao  That,  naming 
a  dozen  or  more  as  he  pointed  them  out  roundabout.  "This  is  only  a 
little  corner  suburb  of  our  great  city,  but  in  Bahia  itself  there  are 
churches." 

It  is  a  popular  saying  in  Bahia  that  there  is  one  church  for  every  day 
in  the  year,  an  exaggeration  probably,  but  there  are  scores  of  massive 
old  colonial  ones,  not  to  mention  monasteries  full  of  fat,  loafing  monks, 
on  all  the  best  commanding  heights  and  taking  up  perhaps  half  the 
city's  space.  While  some  are  fallen  in  ruins  and  are  melting  away  from 
the  physical  impossibility  of  keeping  up  so  many,  even  now  this  ignorant, 
poverty-stricken  city  was  building  several  more,  the  latest  to  cost 
three  thousand  contos — though  not  thirty  per  cent  of  the  contributors 
can  read.  In  contrast,  the  schools  of  Bahia  are  horrible  little  dens 
over  butchershops  and  saloons  and  brothels,  with  forty  or  fifty  children 
packed  into  rooms  that  would  not  be  comfortable  for  ten,  without  any 
arrangements  whatever  for  their  bodily  requirements.  Even  at  that, 
if  every  school  in  the  city  were  packed  to  suffocation  from  dawn  until 
dark,  not  one  third  the  children  of  school  age  could  attend  them.  The 
public  library  in  this  capital  of  an  enormous  and  potentially  rich  state, 
in  a  town  of  one  third  of  a  miUion  inhabitants,  reported  that  "632  books 
or  works  of  reference  were  consulted  during  the  year."  Yet  fear  or 
superstition  caused  every  newspaper  in  town  to  print  long  editorials 
praising  the  "beautiful  festa  of  Bomfim"  and  the  honor  it  did  to  "Him 
whom  it  lionored,"  while  the  drunken  debauchery  was  still  going  on. 

By  the  Wednesday  after  my  arrival  "Colonel"  Ruben,  who,  whatever 
his  faults,  knew  the  art  of  advertising,  had  the  fronts  of  all  street-cars 
and  every  blank  wall  in  town  plastered  with  Kinetophone  posters 
mostly  of  his  own  concoction,  announcing  to  his  fellow-citizens  that  on 
Quarfa  Fcria — Fourth  Festival,  to  wit :  Thursday — would  open  the 
Greatest    Cinematographic    Occurrence    of    the    Ages;    The    Eighth 


356  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Marvel!  Surprising!  Stupendous!  !  Phenomenal!  !  1  The  Discovery 
of  the  Year.  Man  no  longer  dies!  Edison  has  immortalized  him! 
And  at  Popular  Prices !  I  Everyone  to  the  SAO  JOAO  !  !  !  When 
a  brilliant  sun  woke  me  before  seven  on  that  epochal  morning,  there 
was  no  sign  of  a  steamer  in  all  the  blue  expanse  of  All  Saints'  Bay.  I 
shaved  and  was  just  starting  for  the  "rain  bath,"  however,  when  I 
caught  sight  of  one  nearing  harbor.  I  still  had  time  to  dress,  drink  the 
thimbleful  of  black  coffee  they  call  a  breakfast  in  Brazil,  and  descend  to 
the  wharves  before  the  craft  tied  up  there,  with  "Tut"  and  Carlos 
hanging  over  the  rail.  I  brought  them  up  to  my  hotel,  for  as  all  those 
in  Bahia  were  equally  disreputable  it  was  as  well  to  be  together  for 
mutual  protection,  but  it  took  us  until  noon  to  unravel  the  red  tape 
necessary  to  get  our  trunks  ashore,  quite  as  if  we  had  been  landing  from 
a  foreign  country. 

For  all  his  reputation,  "Colonel"  Ruben  was  an  engaging  fellow,  and 
though  I  made  it  plain  to  him  that  I  would  not  trust  him  out  of  my 
sight,  he  took  it  good-naturedly  and  assured  me  he  welcomed  all  the 
"fiscalization"  I  could  give  him. 

"I  notice  you  don't  trust  people  to  any  great  extent  yourself,"  I 
smiled,  thinking  to  let  him  down  easy. 

"Trust!"  cried  Ruben,  with  a  serio-comic  gesture,  "I  trust  my  own 
teeth — and  they  bite  my  tongue !" 

I  took  him  at  his  word  and,  having  designed  a  rubber  stamp,  made 
him  produce  packets  of  the  four  kinds  of  tickets  used,  ran  them  through 
a  consecutive  enumerator,  and  stamped  them  all.  He  who  has  never 
tried  to  stamp  1500  tickets  an  hour  by  hand  will  not  realize  what  a  daily 
task  I  had  laid  out  for  myself  merely  for  the  satisfaction  of  giving 
Ruben  and  his  satellites  proper  "fiscalization."  These  stamped  tickets 
I  handed  each  night  to  the  ticket-seller  and  at  least  one  and  sometimes 
all  three  of  us  stood  at  the  door  ready  to  protest  if  anyone  entered  with- 
out a  stamped  ticket,  as  well  as  to  see  that  all  went  into  the  locked  box 
beside  the  door-keeper.  After  the  show  all  unsold  tickets  were  turned 
over  to  me,  the  treasurer  gave  me  a  copy  of  the  official  bordcraux,  or 
statement  of  tickets  sold  and  the  amount  of  money  taken  in,  I  unlocked 
the  door-boxes  and  carried  home  their  contents  to  check  him  up,  and 
one  half  the  day's  receipts  in  ragged  Brazilian  cash  went  into  my 
pocket  before  I  could  be  budged  out  of  the  "Sao  Joao"  oflfice. 

I  unmasked  one  trickster  at  the  very  first  performance.  Being  still 
stranger  enough  to  most  of  the  "Sao  Joao"  force  to  pass  incognito,  I 
wandered  up  the  dingy  back  stairs  to  the  gallinheiro  (chicken  roost),  as 


NORTHWARD  TO  BAHIA  357 

"nigger  heaven"  is  called  in  Brazil,  and  found  that  the  negro  at  the  door 
was  accepting  money  in  lieu  of  tickets.  It  was  not  that  the  money  was 
not  quite  as  good,  if  anything  it  was  a  triHe  less  flimsy,  but  somehow  it 
could  not  be  forced  into  the  ticket-box  at  the  taker's  elbow.  He  re- 
signed from  Ruben's  staff  less  than  a  minute  later. 

Long  before  the  first  session  ended  we  had  closed  the  inner  doors  and 
the  lobby  was  threatening  to  overflow.  For  the  first  time  in  Brazil  I 
had  permitted  other  "special  attractions"  to  be  offered  with  our  own; 
that  is,  in  addition  to  the  ordinary  films  Ruben  had  engaged  two  stray 
Italian  females  who  howled  through  several  spasms  of  what  they  and 
most  of  the  audience  seemed  to  think  was  music.  As  they  had  been 
hired  before  our  contract  was  made,  and  their  wages  were  nothing  out 
of  our  pockets,  I  could  only  reasonably  demand  that  the  Kinetophone 
remain  the  head-liner.  The  blacks  of  Bahia,  we  soon  discovered,  have 
not  yet  reached  even  the  moving-picture  stage  of  development,  rum. 
dances,  and  church  festivals  being  their  high-water  mark  in  recreation, 
and  not  ten  per  cent,  of  our  paid  audiences  were  negroes,  in  a  town 
where  fully  three  fourths  of  the  population  is  of  that  race.  But  our 
audiences  were  large  for  all  that,  because  the  lighter  minority  came 
again  and  again  to  see  the  chief  novelty  that  had  reached  Bahia  in 
several  seasons.  Even  this  near-white  class,  however,  was  not  con- 
spicuous for  its  prepossessing  appearance,  and  the  calm,  steadfast, 
efiicient  face  of  Edison,  gazing  out  from  our  posters  through  these 
throngs  of  indolent,  ambitionless  mortals,  insignificant  of  physique  and 
racially  entangled,  gave  a  striking  contrast,  typical  of  the  two  continents 
of  the  New  World. 

Our  first  Sunday,  in  particular,  was  a  busy  day.  It  is  the  custom 
all  over  Brazil  for  the  "excellentissimas  familias"  to  go  to  the  "movies" 
on  Sunday  afternoon  or  evening,  and  the  habit  is  so  fixed  that  they 
prefer  to  pack  in  to  the  point  of  drowning  in  their  own  perspiration, 
even  at  double  prices,  rather  than  see  a  better  show  on  a  week  day.  For 
managers  naturally  take  advantage  of  this  fad  and  offer  their  poorest 
attractions — just  as  Ruben  withdrew  his  "imported  artists"  on  this  day 
— knowing  they  will  fill  their  houses  anyway.  If  only  we  could  have 
taken  Sunday  with  us,  movable,  transportable,  and  played  on  that  day 
in  every  town,  w^e  would  have  made  as  great  a  fortune  as  if  the  World 
War  had  never  cast  the  pall  of  a  "brutal  crisis"  over  Brazil. 

By  one  in  the  afternoon  I  was  at  the  theater  door  in  impresario  full- 
dress  and  managerial  smile,  greeting  the  considerable  crowd  that  came 
to  the  matinee,  and  disrupting  the  plans  of  those  who  had  hoped  to  drag 


358  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

five  or  six  children  by  in  the  shadow  of  their  skirts  or  trousers.  Then, 
with  scarcely  time  for  a  meat-laden  Brazilian  supper  in  our  disreputable 
hotel  across  the  street,  I  came  back  to  the  most  crowded  theater  I  had 
seen  in  months.  By  7 130  we  had  already  closed  the  inner  doors  and  the 
elite  of  Bahia  continued  to  stack  up  in  the  lobby  until  that,  too,  had 
overflowed  long  before  the  first  session  ended.  We  were  compelled  to 
send  policemen  in  to  eject  the  first  audience,  and  when  the  house  had 
been  emptied  and  the  gates  opened  again,  it  flooded  full  from  floor  to 
"paradise"  five  stories  up  as  quickly  as  a  lock  at  Panama  does  with 
water.  Even  then  all  could  not  crowd  in,  and  we  herded  them  up  once 
more  in  preparation  for  a  third  session,  which,  though  not  beginning 
until  after  ten,  was  also  packed.  Nothing  so  warms  the  cockles  of  a 
manager's  heart  as  to  watch  an  unbroken  sea  of  flushed  and  eager 
faces  following  his  entertainment.  By  this  time  I  had  met  most  of  the 
high  society  of  Bahia,  all  her  white  and  near-white  "best  families," 
with  now  and  then  some  physically  very  attractive  girls  among  them, 
having  marched  at  least  once  past  my  eagle  eye.  That  night  I  carried 
off  more  money  than  had  fallen  to  our  lot  since  our  first  days  in  Rio 
and  Sao  Paulo. 

Though  silver  was  conspicuous  by  its  scarcity  in  Bahia,  there  were 
other  troubles  attached  to  the  handling  of  money.  Those  familiar 
only  with  the  quick  and  convenient  methods  of  American  banks  can 
have  little  conception  of  the  difficulties  of  banking  in  South  America. 
No  two  banks  in  any  city  in  Brazil,  for  instance,  would  accept  one 
another's  checks;  worse  still,  two  branches  of  the  same  bank  in  neigh- 
boring cities  would  not  transfer  funds  of  their  depositors  without  all 
the  formalities  and  expense  involved  in  such  transactions  between 
foreign  countries.  Where  there  is  no  mutual  confidence  there  can  be 
no  credit  system,  and  instead  of  giving  or  receiving  a  check,  one  must 
carry  a  roll  of  cash,  like  a  professional  gambler  or  a  manipulator  of 
politicians.  By  the  time  I  had  four  contos  laid  away  in  a  British 
bank,  exchange  had  bounded  skyward  again,  and  it  would  only  have 
been  to  waste  what  little  Linton  was  making  to  buy  drafts  as  that  rate ; 
yet  the  bank  refused  to  transfer  our  account  to  their  own  institution  in 
Rio  or  Pernambuco,  except  at  a  high  commission.  When  the  day  came 
for  us  to  move  northward  again  I  was  forced  to  draw  out  our  earnings 
in  ragged  bills  of  tiny  denominations  and  carry  them  with  me. 

Of  "deadheads"  and  official  mendicants  the  "Sao  Joao"  had  its  full 
share.  Ruben  sent  ten  tickets  a  day  to  police  headquarters,  but  those 
who  came  on  duty  gave  these  tickets  to  friends  and  bootblacks  and  negro 


NORTHWARD  TO  BAHIA  359 

relatives,  and  thrust  their  way  in  on  the  strength  of  their  uniform  or 
hadge.  We  were  overrun  with  grafters  filhng  seats  and  using  up 
programs  for  which  honest  people  would  have  been  willing  to  pay 
money,  while  a  dozen  of  the  best  boxes  were  permanently  allocated 
to  state  and  municipal  officials  and  powerful  politicians.  When  I  pro- 
tested to  "Colonel"  Ruben,  I  learned  another  interesting  little  fact,— he 
was  forced  to  be  kind  to  politicians  because,  thanks  to  his  political  pull, 
he  got  this  great  four-tier  theater,  built  by  the  government  in  viceroy 
days  and  now  belonging  to  the  State  of  Bahia,  rent  free!  As  to  the 
police,  he  confided  to  me  that  he  had  to  be  lenient  with  them  in  order 
that  they  might  not  be  too  harsh  with  him  when  he  offered  shows  of  the 
"scm  roupa"  or  undress  variety. 

For  all  the  resentment  of  frustrated  "deadheads"  and  the  attitude 
of  Bahia's  newspapers,  which  at  first  gave  five  lines  to  Edison's  in- 
vention and  full  pages  to  the  religious  debauch  of  Bomfim,  the  success 
of  the  Kinetophone  forced  the  five  or  six  dailies  to  give  our  engagement 
increasing  attention.  They  were  all  rather  pitiful  sheets,  and  in  a  town 
where  at  least  three- fourths  of  the  population  never  reads  it  would  have 
seemed  highly  advisable  to  have  combined  them  into  one  good  news- 
\^^i\^QV.  That  of  course  would  have  been  impossible,  because  of  Latin- 
America's  lack  of  team-work  and  mutual  confidence,  as  well  as  the  de- 
mand of  each  political  faction  for  its  own  organ  of  propaganda.  One 
day  there  appeared  in  the  best  of  these  sorry  journals  a  long  and  learned 
article  by  a  Brazilian  purist  who,  though  flattering  to  the  invention  and 
the  inventor,  asserted  that  it  should  be  called  "Cinephonio"  rather  than 
"Kinetophone."  I  was  feeling  in  good  Portuguese  form  by  this  time, 
and  having  leisure  enough  to  dig  back  through  the  layers  of  philology 
to  ancient  Greece,  I  sent  in  an  equally  long  and  learned  answer  that 
decidedly  surprised  editor,  contributor,  and  reading  public,  accustomed 
only  to  the  type  of  American  business  man  who  is  utterly  ignorant  of. 
and  wholly  uninterested  in,  the  native  tongue.  Comments  on  this  con- 
troversy and  its  astonishing  denouement  drifted  to  my  ears  from  our 
throngs  for  more  than  a  week  afterward. 

Such  experiences  as  this  emphasized  the  unwisdom  of  the  habit  of 
many  American  firms  of  sending  the  same  "drummer"  to  cover  both 
Brazil  and  Spanish-America.  Brazilians  have  a  rivalry  toward  Ar- 
gentines which  amounts  to  hatred ;  they  consider  the  Castilian  tongue 
particularly  the  language  of  the  Argentine  and  at  least  pretend  to  re- 
gard it  as  a  corruption  of  their  own.  of  which  they  are  unreasonably 
proud.     Hence  the  traveling-man  who  addresses  them  in  Spanish  is 


36o  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

more  apt  to  arouse  resentment  than  commercial  interest.  If  he  cannot 
speak  Portuguese,  he  will  do  better  to  stick  to  English,  using  an  in- 
terpreter when  necessary,  or  take  a  chance  on  his  French,  which  most 
educated  Brazilians  understand  more  or  less,  rather  than  deliberately 
to  incense  them  by  using  the  tongue  of  their  rivals  and  implying  its 
importance  over  their  own. 

We  had  now  reached  a  latitude  where  it  is  doubly  wise  for  the  white 
man  to  exercise  regularly,  and  the  daily  walk  that  had  always  been  a 
custom  I  now  made  a  stern  requirement.     Complaints  against  sluggish 
livers  were  almost  uiniversal  in  the  small  foreign  colony,  but  I  noted 
that  they  invariably  went  with  large  liquor  bills  and  a  scorn  of  pe- 
destrianism,  even  in  its  mildest  forms.     Personally,  though  it  was  un- 
questionably hot  and  perspiration  flowed  at  the  least  physical  exertion, 
I  found  the  climate  of  Bahia  agreeing  splendidly  with  me,  and  a  few- 
miles  of  brisk  walking,  followed  by  a  refreshing  "rain  bath,"  became  a 
pleasure  to  which  to  look  forward.     "Tut"  could  frequently  be  coaxed 
to  go  with  me,  but  his  Brazilian  training  made  Carlos  prefer  to  loaf 
about  the  theater  and  watch  the  rehearsing  of  dancing  girls,  in  the  face 
of  my  warning  that  he  was  now  in  a  different  land  than  his  cool  and 
temperate  Sao  Paulo.     There  were  fine  points  to  Carlos;  one  often 
caught  a  suggestion  that  in  some  such  stern  environment  as  the  United 
States  he  would  have  turned  out  a  man  of  parts,  but  the  error  of  his 
parents  in  turning  south  instead  of  north  across  the  Atlantic  made  his 
struggle  with  environment  a  pitched  battle,  with  the  odds  against  him. 
There  are  endless  wooded  hills  and  valleys  in  Bahia,  with  old  forts 
on  every  projecting  angle  of  the  city,  on  both  the  bay  and  the  ocean 
side,  which  recall  the  days  when  Sao  Salvador  was  the  proud  capital  of 
Brazil,  unworried  by  the  suspicion  of  a  future  rival.     Out  beyond  the 
elite  section  along  the  Rua  Victoria,  past  the  old  church  said  t.3  stand 
on  the  very  site  in  which  the  city  was  founded,  a  nose  of  land  jutting 
out  into  the  sea  and  swept  by  unfailing  breezes  was  shaded  by  an  aged 
fort  and  lighthouse  that  made  its  sloping  greensward  or  quaint  stone 
benches  the  most  ideal  place  in  South  America  to  spend  an  afternoon 
lolling  over  a  book.     If  one  felt  more  energetic,  there  were  amusing 
characters  among  the  curious  wicker  fish-traps  down  on  the  beach 
below.     Often  I  walked  all  morning  long  entirely  within  the  city  limits 
through  dense  uninhabited  jungle,   following   soft  earth  roads  down 
through  great  valleys  with  clusters  of  negro  cabins,  and  shops  of  the 
equally  superstitious  Portuguese  with  whom  they  trade,  bearing  such 
names  as  "Fe  em  Deus,"  "Esperanq  aem  Deus."  "Todo  com  Deus,"  the 


NORTHWARD  TO  RAHTA  361 

householders  lolHng  in  the  shade  beneath  them  and  letting  Deus  do  the 
rest.  Here  the  motto  seemed  to  be  "God  helps  those  who  wave  a  flag 
with  His  name  on  it."  It  was  almost  a  relief  to  run  across  such 
frankly  cynical  shop-names  as  "A  Protectora  da  Probeza"  (The  Pro- 
tector of  Poverty). 

Bahia  is  built  on  a  peninsula  connected  with  the  rest  of  the  continent 
by  a  narrow  neck  of  land,  and  out  this  runs  its  railway  line,  soon  to 
split  into  three  branches  which  wander  away  into  the  interior  of  the 
state.  My  random  wandering  brought  me  out  across  this  one  morning 
and  on  along  the  .shore  of  an  inner  arm  of  the  bay,  here  endlessly  lined 
with  negro  huts.  I  was  quenching  my  tropical  thirst  with  a  juicy 
watermelon  when  a  negro  stopped  to  ask  if  I  did  not  know  that  I  would 
die  if  I  ate  watermelon  in  the  middle  of  the  day,  and  soon  brought  a 
crowd  of  excited  blacks  chattering  and  gesticulating  about  me.  South 
America  is  full  of  such  amusing  superstitions,  concerning  the  danger 
of  eating  certain  foods  at  certain  times,  or  of  eating  simultaneously  two 
that  do  not  "fit  together."  An  old  dugout  sailed  me  across  the  breezy 
neck  of  the  inner  bay  from  Brandao  to  Itapagipe,  sparing  me  a  return 
tramp  of  five  miles,  for  at  this  point  the  electric  cars  pass  frequently. 
There  is  a  long  beach  in  this  middle-class  suburb  of  Itapagipe,  and  a 
little  wharf  at  which  crude  sailing  boats  from  about  the  bay  unload 
watermelons  and  mangos,  bananas  and  big  luscious  pineapples,  the  latter 
selling  on  the  spot  for  a  mere  fostao,  or  those  with  empty  pockets  may 
fish  slightly  damaged  ones  out  of  the  water  for  nothing.  On  such  ex- 
cursions one  must  take  care  not  to  dress  too  carelessly,  for  there  are, 
of  course,  two  classes  in  the  Philadelphia-made  street-cars  of  Bahia  and 
little  visible  sign  to  distinguish  them,  so  that  on  almo.st  every  tour 
through  the  first-class  car  the  conductor  is  forced  to  order  men  without 
coats,  or  collars,  or  socks,  or  real  shoes,  or  a  proper  haircut  to  go  back 
into  the  other.  On  the  other  hand  he,  too,  has  his  rebuflfs,  for  almost 
anyone  wearing  a  frock-coat  says  haughtily.  "I  have  a  pass,"  though 
never  offering  to  show  it,  and  the  conductor  sneaks  obsequiously  on. 

A  favorite  recreation  of  foreign  residents  and  wealthy  w'hite  natives 
of  Bahia  is  to  visit  the  principal  ships  that  anchor  in  the  harbor.  To 
many  this  is  the  one  touch  of  civilization  superior  to  that  at  home,  as  the 
trains  in  which  the  people  come  to  sit  for  a  few  minutes  are  to  the  in- 
habitants of  interior  villages.  But  most  of  them  come  for  more 
material  purposes. — the  foreign  residents  to  imbibe  "real  booze"  once 
more,  the  elite  among  the  natives  to  defraud  the  country's  revenues  by 
replenishing  their  wardrobes  at  the  ship's  barber  shop,  buying  boxes 


362  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

of  chocolate,  scented  soap,  perfumes,  lingerie,  all  the  smaller  luxuries 
which  can  only  be  had  at  much  higher  price  or  not  at  all  on  shore, 
"women  of  the  life"  on  professional  errands  or  merely  to  catch  a 
breath  of  their  beloved  Europe.  There  was  a  steam-laundry  on  the 
ships  I  visited  and  had  I  thought  of  it  in  time  I  might  have  brought 
my  soiled  "linen"  on  board,  as  did  not  a  few  residents,  and  had  it  back 
when  the  boat  returned  from  Buenos  Aires.  To  entrust  anything  to 
the  native  washerwomen  of  Brazil,  particularly  of  Bahia,  is  to  risk 
having  it  worn  for  a  week  or  more  by  the  laundress's  husband  or  lover, 
and  to  insure  that  it  shall  be  beaten  to  a  pulp  in  some  mud-hole,  dried 
among  goat-dung,  and  returned  a  fortnight  or  so  later  more  torn  and 
soiled  than  when  it  departed. 

About  a  week  after  we  opened  in  Bahia,  Ruben  drifted  around  to  my 
usual  station  in  the  course  of  the  evening  and  said  that  he  would  like 
to  lengthen  our  contract  from  twenty-five  to  ninety  days.  I  declined 
at  once,  at  least  on  a  fifty  per  cent,  basis.  He  next  offered  to  pay  the 
baggage  haul  in  addition ;  then  he  promised  to  defray  all  our  traveling 
expenses,  and  to  cover  all  the  territory  from  Bahia  to  Pernambuco.  I 
promised  to  think  this  over. 

Though  I  had  not  found  Ruben  "crooked  as  a  bed-spring,"  as  some  of 
his  former  business  associates  described  him,  I  knew  that  he  had  not 
been  designed  with  a  T-square — and  Ruben  knew  that  I  knew  it.  But 
he  was  a  good  "mixer"  and  an  excellent  manipulator  of  politicians, 
which  is  a  great  advantage  in  Brazil,  and  is  acquired  with  great  difficulty 
by  a  foreigner,  no  matter  how  well  he  may  learn  the  language.  Be- 
sides, Ruben  had  the  most  American  ideas  on  advertising  of  any  Brazil- 
ian I  had  ever  met  and  though,  of  course,  he  expected  to  make  some- 
thing out  of  us,  it  was  a  question  whether  we  would  not  get  more  our- 
selves while  he  was  making  his  profit  than  we  could  make  alone.  Some- 
times a  crook,  well  watched,  is  a  better  business  partner  than  an  honest 
man,  for  he  is  likely  to  take  a  chance  and  is  rarely  as  slow  to  see  an  op- 
portunity as  are  more  sincere  individuals. 

I  did  not,  however,  care  to  spend  three  months  in  that  corner  of  the 
world.  I  hoped,  in  fact,  to  be  well  up  the  Amazon  by  that  time,  and 
after  sleeping  on  it  I  agreed  with  the  "colonel"  on  a  sixty-day  con- 
tract at  the  terms  he  had  offered.  By  this  time  my  practice  in  Portu- 
guese made  it  easy  to  draw  up  an  elaborate  document  of  twelve  articles 
that  even  a  corporation  lawyer  would  have  had  difficulty  in  evading.  In 
effect,  it  made  Ruben  our  advance  agent,  with  the  privilege  of  paying 
himself,  and  left  me  merely  my  managerial  duties.     Indeed,  this  docu- 


NORTHWARD  TO  BAHIA  363 

ment  and  what  had  led  up  to  it  so  took  the  "colonel's"  eye  that  next 
day  he  informed  me  he  needed  a  man  of  my  "pulse,"  or  American 
energy,  and  that  as  soon  as  I  got  the  Kinetophone  hack  to  the  United 
States  I  must  return  and  become  manager  of  the  big  new  theater  he  was 
soon  going  to  build  on  the  triangular  vacant  lot  near  the  "Sao  Joao"! 

"Muito  obrigado,"  I  replied,  that  being  Brazilian  for  "much  obliged." 

We  were  to  play  in  Bahia  and  about  the  bay  until  carnival  time, 
come  back  to  the  "Sao  Joao"  for  those  festive  days,  and  then  turn  north- 
ward. On  the  morning  of  January  26  we  tore  down  the  show  and 
loaded  it  into  the  special  baggage-tramcar  Ruben  had  furnished,  moving 
under  guidance  of  his  part-Indian  mulatto  sub-manager  out  to  the 
suburb  of  Rio  Vermelho.  This  was  a  sea-beach  village  of  mainly  well- 
to-do  white  residents — though  no  one  seemed  to  bathe,  at  least  in  the 
sea,  in  Bahia — three  miles  from  the  center  of  town  through  densely 
wooded  valleys  of  mango  and  alligator-pear,  jack-fruit  and  bread-fruit 
trees,  all  heavily  loaded  with  their  products.  We  played  to  packed 
houses,  with  few  "deadheads,"  for  here  Ruben  had  little  fear  either  of 
]X)liticians  or  police.  The  cinema  of  A  Barra,  another  seaside  suburb 
to  which  we  moved  three  days  later,  was  an  outtloor  place  of  sandy 
bottom,  a  sheet-iron  wall,  and  only  a  suggestion  of  roof,  always  com- 
fortable with  the  trade  wind  sweeping  through  it.  There  I  could  go  to 
the  show  and  look  at  the  brilliant  moon  at  the  same  time,  and  our  film- 
men  could  be  heard  talking  and  singing  blocks  away. 

Having  performed  the  extraordinary  feat  of  sleeping  seventeen 
consecutive  nights  in  the  same  bed,  I  decided  tliat  I  needed  a  change  of 
scene.  Up  at  the  head  of  the  bay  was  a  town  called  Santo  Amaro  da 
Purificaqao,  where  Ruben  had  planned  to  take  us ;  but  a  religious 
festival  having  broken  out  there,  he  changed  his  mind,  saying  that 
negroes  celebrating  church  festas  do  not  spend  money  on  cinemas.  I 
went  over  to  see  whether  he  was  right,  and  incidentally  to  revel  in  the 
"purification"  attached  to  the  town's  name. 

One  of  the  little  steamers  of  the  "Navegagao  Bahiana"  that  sail  the 
bay,  leaving  three  times  a  week  for  most  of  the  towns  around  it,  de- 
parted at  high  tide  with  a  considerable  crowd  bound  for  the  fcsta.  It 
was  hot  under  the  lee  of  the  land,  but  once  out  on  the  blue  water 
nothing  could  have  been  more  pleasant,  at  least  in  so  far  as  weather  was 
concerned.  We  stopped  at  three  towns  on  as  many  islands  and  passed 
many  smaller  ones  along  the  base  of  the  bay  shore,  almost  everywhere 
piled  up  in  hundred-foot  cliffs.  The  soil,  even  on  the  smallest  islands, 
was  of  that  deep-red  color  common  to  much  of  Brazil,  and  royal  palms 


364  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

lifted  their  proud  heads  over  a  reed-and-mud  negro  hut  on  many  a  little 
island.  We  picked  up  /c^y^a-dressed  passengers  at  several  villages. 
Perhaps  one  out  of  twenty  of  my  fellow-travelers  showed  no  traces  of 
negro  ancestry.  Bad  teeth  were  universal  among  them,  more  un- 
sightly still  in  the  case  of  those  with  a  smile  like  a  flash  of  a  brass-shop 
window,  who  could  afford  the  ministrations  of  the  wandering  "dentists" 
that  inflict  interior  Brazil. 

By  and  by  the  water  turned  from  the  dense  clear -blue  of  the  bay 
to  a  grayish  color.  Several  large  time-blackened  churches  appeared  on 
commanding,  breezy  noses  of  land,  with  a  few  poor  houses  and  miser- 
able huts  tucked  away  in  the  hollows  beneath  them.  We  entered  a 
small  river  that  wound  in  S-shape  through  a  sort  of  marsh,  passing  a 
three-story  agricultural  school  that  loomed  up  through  the  palm-tree 
jungle  in  apparently  utter  isolation,  and  at  sunset  tied  up  at  the  end 
of  a  long  causeway  across  a  swamp,  w-here  a  dozen  quaint  little  mule- 
cars  were  waiting  for  us.  The  fare  on  these  for  a  two-mile  ride  was  a 
milreis,  which  was  bad  enough,  but  the  driver,  singling  me  out  as  the 
only  foreigner  and  person  of  wealth  among  the  /c.y/a-bound  horde,  and 
no  doubt  short  of  cash  for  his  own  celebration,  demanded  that  I  pay 
double  fare,  and  was  invited  to  go  to  the  devil  for  his  pains. 

He  was  going  there  anyway,  it  turned  out,  for  if  the  manager  of  the 
more  populous  afterworld  does  not  own  Santo  Amaro  da  Purificagao  it 
would  be  hard  to  get  anyone  else  to  claim  it.  A  long,  thin,  one-story 
town,  stretching  out  for  a  mile  or  more  through  low,  soggy  land,  it  is 
inhabited  almost  entirely  by  animal-like  blacks  festooned  in  dirty  rags. 
Groups  of  loafing  negroes  filled  every  doorway,  covered  every  shady 
spot,  occupied  the  narrow  remnants  of  dilapidated  sidewalks,  doing 
nothing  for  a  living,  not  even  taking  in  one  another's  washing,  and 
living  happily  ever  after  for  all  that.  A  cross  between  a  ditch  and  a 
river  flows — or  rather,  lies — through  the  length  of  the  town,  and  in  this 
stagnant  sewage  the  inhabitants  not  only  attempt  to  swim  when  the 
whim  comes  upon  them,  but  dip  up  water  for  cooking  purposes.  To 
drink  it  would  evidently  kill  even  a  Brazilian  negro,  so  in  various  parts 
of  the  town  there  are  public  spigots  shut  in  by  iron  fences,  with  an 
elaborate  "office"  and  a  turnstile  that  can  be  passed  only  by  paying  a 
vintem  for  a  can  of  water.  Along  the  noisome  canal  are  a  few  dis- 
tilleries, dirty  as  the  rest  of  the  town,  and  a  bit  of  sugar-cane  is  grown 
in  the  vicinity,  but  on  its  edges  Saint  Amaro  of  the  Purification  breaks 
at  once  into  green  rolling  campo,  which  the  swarming  inhabitants  are 
too  indolent  to  cultivate.    Two  automobiles  had  come  to  show  off  at  the 


NORTHWARD  TO  BAH  I A  365 

fcsta,  and  were  so  rare  a  sight  that  whenever  they  appeared,  jouncing 
and  bumping  down  one  of  the  so-called  streets,  with  a  dozen  of  the 
town  notables  clinging  wide-eyed  to  the  seats,  all  the  children  and  most 
of  the  adults  took  to  pursuing  them  with  shouts  of  "Oo  ah-oo-tah- 
mave !" 

Tlie  festival  really  did  not  begin  until  next  day,  but  as  often  happens 
in  Latin-America,  the  people  could  not  wait  and  were  already  cele- 
brating the  vcspcra.  About  the  matrix,  or  main  church,  surged  immense 
throngs  of  leprous,  unwashed  negroes,  hilarious  with  the  drunken- 
religious  orgy.  Native  rum  flowed  everywhere.  There  were  forty-two 
gambling  tables  running  full  blast,  with  crowds  of  children  from  six 
to  sixty — if  anyone  ever  lives  to  that  age  in  Santo  Amaro — throwing 
their  money  upon  them,  many  so  poor  that  they  had  only  coppers  to 
hazard.  Any  negro  boy  who  could  get  a  table,  mark  a  square  of  cloth 
or  cardboard  with  numbers  or  colors,  and  produce  a  tin  can  and 
three  dice  or  any  kind  of  home-made  roulette  wheel,  became  forthwith 
the  proprietor  of  a  gambling  establishment.  The  town  w^as  lighted  by 
gas — except  that  most  of  this  was  now  used  to  illuminate  an  "AVE 
MARIA"  in  letters  ten  feet  high  on  the  faqade  of  the  church.  Under 
this  a  band  blew  itself  almost  brown  in  the  face  in  honor  of  the  tin 
Virgin  inside  the  musty  old  church,  before  which  throngs  of  gaudily 
but  raggedly  dressed  negroes  were  bowing  down,  crossing  themselves 
on  the  face,  mouth,  navel,  and  finally  the  body,  and  displaying  curious 
intermixtures  of  Catholicism  and  African  fetish  worship. 

All  night  long  the  hubbub  lasted.  My  unknown  Brazilian  room- 
mate in  the  "Pensao  Universal."  a  human  sty  which  had  recently  opened 
as  a  public  hostelry  and  would  no  doubt  close  again  after  the  festival, 
had  usurped  the  bed  by  piling  his  junk  upon  it,  and  left  me  a  crippled 
canvas  cot.  I  was  awakened  frequently  by  the  cold  coming  up  through 
this,  though  by  no  means  so  often  as  by  the  amorous  negro  swains  and 
wenches  retiring  from  the  exciting  festivities  to  adjoining  rooms. 

High  noon  found  me  struggling  to  get  a  railway-ticket  back  to 
Bahia.  It  was  no  easy  feat.  Eventually  we  had  to  break  into  the 
inner  office  and  corner  the  befuddled  agent,  who  replied  to  our  excited 
demands  with  a  tropically  phlegmatic,  "But  there  is  no  hurry;  the  train 
will  not  really  leave  at  twelve."  Subsecjuent  events  proved  that  he  was  a 
better  prophet  than  the  printed  time-table.  We  finally  dragged  away 
about  two,  on  a  railroad  built  in  1881  and  still  retaining  the  same  road- 
bed, rolling-stock,  swell-headed  old  engines  and  point  of  view,  and 
rambled  along  most  of  the  afternoon,  until  we  came  to  a  derailed  train 


366  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

and  were  told  to  get  out  and  walk.  Luckily  we  were  only  a  few  miles 
from  Aijoa  Cumprida  (Long  Water),  where  this  branch  line  is  joined 
by  one  from  up  the  coast — and  on  the  whole  it  might  be  a  good  thing 
to  make  travelers  by  rail  get  off  every  little  while  and  walk  a  few  miles. 
As  the  first  long  cove  of  the  beautiful  bay  came  into  view  I  dropped 
off  and  was  sailed  across  the  neck  of  water  in  one  of  the  ferry  dugouts 
to  Itapagipe,  where  one  engagement  at  the  "Theatro  Popular"  was 
proving  popular  indeed. 

Three  days  later  all  of  us,  including  Ruben  in  person,  took  a  side- 
wheel  steamer  across  the  bay  to  Sao  Felix,  planning  to  spend  a  week 
away  from  the  city.  Across  the  deck  from  me  sat  a  white  woman 
with  three  chain  bracelets,  one  wrist  watch,  seven  very  large  rings  on 
four  fingers  of  the  left  hand,  six  more  on  the  four  fingers  of  the  right 
hand,  a  gold  watch-chain  some  two  yards  long  about  her  neck,  enormous 
showy  earrings,  a  gold  locket  and  pendant,  and  various  other  gaudy 
odds  and  ends.  This  paragon  of  taste,  it  turned  out,  was  one  of  our 
party.  She  was  from  Montevideo  and  Ruben  had  brought  her  along 
to  do  a  Spanish  dance  scm  roupa — no  wonder  she  needed  to  be  covered 
with  jewelry — for  the  benefit  of  the  matutos,  or  "country  gawks,"  of 
the  interior. 

A  couple  of  hours  carried  us  across  the  main  bay  and  we  entered  a 
narrow  inlet  which  soon  swelled  into  another  and  smaller  bay  that 
gradually  narrowed  down  until  we  found  ourselves  in  an  immense 
river,  the  Paraguassu,  with  low  bushy  sides  and  water  well  up  to  the 
branches  of  the  few  trees  at  high  tide.  Villages,  towns,  and  single  old 
/o;:r«(/a-houses  under  their  majestic  royal  palms  appeared  here  and 
there,  at  some  of  which  we  tied  up.  Others  sent  on  board  or  took 
ashore  two  or  three  of  the  plantation  family  in  flimsy  dugout  logs 
paddled  by  more  or  less  naked  negroes.  Most  of  the  towns  had  names 
ending  in  "gipe"  and  lived  on  their  exports  of  fumo  and  charutos 
(tobacco  and  cigars),  that  weed,  as  well  as  fruit  and  cacao,  growing 
abundantly  back  in  what  looked  like  rather  a  barren  and  bushy  land. 
The  river  narrowed,  winding  through  low  hills,  and  at  sunset  we 
sighted  the  twin  towns  of  Sao  Felix  and  Cachoeira,  on  opposite  sides 
of  the  stream  and  connected  by  a  long  railway-and-foot-bridge,  at  the 
foot  of  a  series  of  rapids  over  black  jagged  rocks  that  halt  navigation 
and  give  the  latter  town  its  name. 

As  usual  bedlam  broke  loose  between  the  chaotic-minded  passengers 
and  the  aggressive  boatmen,  carregadores,  and  touts  fighting  for  busi- 
ness.   Though  there  was  an  abundance  of  men  in  ragged,  baggy  uni- 


NORTHWARD  TO  BAHIA  367 

forms,  no  one  seemed  to  have  any  authority.  One  evil-eyed,  half-haked 
looking  fellow  who  drew  a  razor  in  the  midst  of  the  turmoil  turned  out 
to  be  the  hotel-keeper  who  had  been  told  to  prepare  rooms  for  "the 
entire  Kinetophone  company,"  and  who  did  not  propose  to  be  out- 
witted by  a  rival.  We  let  them  fight  it  out,  put  our  light  baggage 
mto  a  ferry  "canoe"  with  Carlos  and  the  undress  "artist,"  and  sent 
them  across  the  river — our  theater  being  in  Sao  Felix  and  the  boat- 
landing  in  Cachoeira.  Then  we  walked  a  mile  or  more  along  the 
rough-and-tumble  stone  streets  of  what  appeared  by  the  weak  gas- 
lamps  to  be  a  town  transported  bodily  from  the  heart  of  the  Andes, 
paid  sixty  reis  at  the  bridge  turnstile,  and  brought  up  at  the  tiny 
•'Cinema  Sao  Felix."  There  Ruben  and  the  Italian  owner  broke  into 
such  garrulous  greetings  that  it  was  after  eight  before  we  finally 
dragged  our  guide  and  mentor  away  to  the  "hotel"  of  the  belligerent 
seeker-after-guests,  who  was  now  grieving  over  the  unexpected  scanti- 
ness of  our  "company." 

Of  the  pseudo-meal  foisted  upon  us  after  two  hours  of  shouting, 
swearing,  and  insisting,  I  will  say  nothing,  and  even  less  of  the  boiler- 
factory  din  that  seethed  through  the  tiny  pens  divided  by  thin  wooden 
partitions  reaching  only  halfway  to  the  unceiled  roof,  except  to  remark 
that,  as  soon  as  the  show  was  installed  next  morning,  "Tut"  and  I 
might  have  been  seen  moving  across  the  river  to  the  "Hotel  das  Nagoes" 
in  Cachoeira.  This  second  city  of  the  State  of  Bahia — equal  in  size 
to  Texas — was  only  a  languid  backward  village,  without  electric-lights, 
without  even  a  wheeled  vehicle,  unless  one  counts  the  tri- weekly  side- 
wheel  steamer  or  the  little  railway  that  rattles  up  to  Feira  do  Sant'  Anna 
and  straggles  165  miles  west  into  the  interior  of  the  state.  There  are 
several  moderately  large  tobacco  and  cigar  warehouses,  but  almost  the 
only  sign  of  industry  in  either  of  the  twin  towns  was  our  advertising, — 
a  deluge  of  posters  and  handbills,  and  a  parade  of  tabolctas,  or  large 
movable  street-signs,  accompanied  by  negro  boys  beating  cymbals, 
drums,  and  tin  pans.  We  charged  double  prices,  because  the  theater 
was  too  small  to  make  anything  less  worthwhile — and  we  played  to 
128  paying  clients  and  a  score  of  "deadheads"! 

Next  day  the  Italian  cinema-man  begged  us  with  tears  in  his  voice  to 
cut  the  entrance  fee  in  two,  and  as  some  such  drastic  action  seemed 
necessary  to  save  us  from  bankruptcy,  I  agreed — and  that  night  we 
had  89  paid  admissions!  These  interior  towns  are  so  sunk  in  sloth  that 
they  seem  to  resent  any  attempt  to  shake  them  out  of  the  somnolence  of 
their  ancestors,  out  of  that  apathetic  indifference  10  the  advances  of 


368  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

civilization  which  makes  them  scorn  even  the  few  opportunities  of  a 
life-time  to  see  something  new  and  important,  to  get  some  hint  of  the 
world's  progress.  Only  the  barbaric  recreation  of  drunken  church 
festivals  appeals  to  them. 

I  took  advantage  of  the  Sunday  train  to  visit  Feira  do  Sant'  Anna, 
thirty  miles  up-country.  This  line  was  built  back  in  the  seventies,  yet 
the  names  of  Hugh  Wilson  and  other  Americans  still  appear  on  various 
bridges  and  viaducts.  The  train  climbed  for  half  an  hour,  and  still 
we  could  look  down  upon  the  twin  towns  close  below,  but  once  up  on 
top  of  the  flat,  rather  dry  and  sandy,  plateau  it  raced  along  at  decent 
Brazilian  speed.  The  slender  branches  of  the  mandioca  were  numerous^ 
and  here  I  saw  my  first  tobacco-fields  in  Brazil.  At  one  station  a  mile 
from  the  town  it  served  saddle-horses  were  waiting  for  the  men  and 
enormous,  bungling,  two-wheeled  mule-carts  with  wicker  armchairs  in 
them  for  the  women.  It  would  have  been  dreadful  if  one  of  the  whiter 
collar  class  had  been  forced  to  walk  that  mile  along  the  smooth,  dry, 
cool  summer  road.  For  it  was  pleasant  and  breezy  up  here,  though 
the  elevation  was  not  great ;  even  at  summer  midday  one  could  walk 
comfortably  in  the  sun  bareheaded — provided  one  could  walk  anywhere 
comfortably.  My  preconceived  notions  of  this  region  proved  entirely 
false.  I  had  expected  dense  jungle  and  forest,  and  humid,  leaden 
heat;  on  the  contrary,  it  was  not  only  dry  and  cool,  but  almost  bare 
of  vegetation. 

Feira  do  Sant'  Anna,  so  named  for  the  great  cattle-fairs  that  were 
held  here  on  St.  Ann's  day,  is  less  than  a  century  old,  a  one-story  town 
sitting  out  unsheltered  on  a  dry,  sandy,  plain.  Two  streets  wider 
than  Broadway  cross  at  right  angles  in  the  center  of  town,  and  are 
fully  paved  with  cobblestones  and  lined  with  small  bushy  shade  trees. 
On  Monday  market-days  these  are  thronged  with  countrymen  and 
women  from  a  hundred  miles  around.  To-day  a  cockfight  under  a  big 
tree  on  the  outskirts  seemed  to  be  the  only  activity.  Two  roosters 
without  artificial  spurs,  but  with  bloody  heads  and  necks,  entirely 
featherless  in  spots,  pecked  at  each  other  eternally,  while  bullet-headed 
negroes  and  mulattoes  stood  around  them  betting — if  they  still  had 
any  coppers — one  owner  or  the  other  occasionally  picking  up  his  bird, 
spraying  a  mouthful  of  rum-and-water  on  its  head  and  neck,  and 
setting  them  at  it  again,  until  one  fell  from  utter  exhaustion  and  the 
other,  wabbling  drunkenly  on  his  bloody  feet,  uttered  a  feeble  crow 
of  victory.  Wells  with  good  American  force-pumps  marked  the  town  a 
rare  one  for  interior  South  America,  where  the  inhabitants  generally 


NORTHWARD  TO  BAHIA  369 

drink  from  some  nearby  creek  or  mud-hole ;  but  drought  had  left  little  at 
the  bottoms  even  of  the  wells,  and  this  scant  supply  negro  boys  were 
delivering  to  various  parts  of  town  in  casks  on  mule  or  donkey- 
back,  a  blue  enameled  government  license  on  the  forehead  of  each  four- 
footed  animal. 

When  we  got  back  to  Bahia  on  February  10  a  brand  new  hotel  had 
been  opened  on  the  space  left  between  Ruben's  present  theater  and 
the  invisible  one  I  had  the  opportunity  of  some  day  managing.  It  was  a 
five-story,  flat-iron  placctc  on  the  height  of  the  city,  the  highest  building 
in  Rahia,  or,  indeed,  in  the  state,  and  was  the  wonder  of  the  region. 
The  only  elevator  in  the  paunch  of  South  America,  except  the  outdoor 
one  between  the  lower  and  higher  city,  ran  all  the  way  up  it,  but  when 
"Tut"'  and  I  entered,  it  refused  at  first  to  work,  whereupon  I  stepped 
out  again  to  get  something  I  had  forgotten. 

"Oh,  don't  be  afraid !"  cried  the  servant,  himself  ashy  with  fear,  who 
was  attempting  to  manipulate  it,  "it  won't  fall." 

On  the  fifth  floor,  spoken  of  with  a  catch  of  the  breath  in  Bahia,  we 
had  a  pleasant  little  room  with  a  vast  outlook  over  city  and  ocean — 
and  as  it  was  starting  in  to  acquire  a  reputation,  the  place  was  strictly 
a  hotel  and  not  a  brothel.  Materially  it  was  a  great  relief  from  what 
we  had  been  enduring  for  weeks  past,  and  the  unwonted  sensation  of 
living  in  well-nigh  civilized  surroundings  again  was  welcome,  but  a 
hotel,  after  all,  takes  its  tone  from  its  guests  and  servants,  and  these 
being  Bahianos,  it  w^as  doubtful  whether  so  expensive  an  establishment 
would  be  able  to  keep  its  head  above  water.  Speaking  of  water,  the 
shower-baths  were  extra,  as  usual  in  Brazil,  but  when  I  confided  to  the 
manager  that  I  would  move  out  again  next  day,  he  hastened  to  assure 
me  that  no  one  would  notice  when  I  bathed. 

Street-cars  and  walls  were  again  flaunting  Kinetophone  advertise- 
ments inviting  everyone  to  come  and  see  the  "marvel  of  the  age." 
But  it  was  "reheated  soup"  in  Bahia  now,  and  out  at  Itapagipe,  where 
we  had  played  three  nights  to  crowded  houses  only  a  week  before,  the 
Latin  enthusiasm  had  effervesced  and  we  had  only  a  straggling  audience. 
If  only  we  had  had  some  new  numbers,  say  a  couple  of  Caruso!  The 
second  night  was  worse,  with  our  share  only  36$,  and  the  owner 
refused  to  give  a  show  at  all  on  the  next  and  last  night,  saying  the  few 
days  before  carnival  were  the  worst  in  the  year  in  the  theatrical  busi- 
ness, as  everyone  with  a  tostao  was  keeping  it  to  buy  masks,  confetti, 
and  scented  water. 

Carnival  costumes  and  the  silly  soprano  speech  that  goes  with  them 


370  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

were  already  beginning  to  appear  in  the  streets,  and  by  noon  on  Sunday 
negroes  and  half -negroes  in  fantastic  make-up  were  ever>^where.  Most 
of  the  "Sao  Joao"  employees  were  drunk  or  excited  or  parading  the 
streets  by  the  time  we  opened  for  the  matinee,  and  as  I  could  watch 
the  door  as  well  from  there,  I  sat  down  behind  the  wicket  and  became 
ticket-seller.  Few  ticket-offices  in  the  world  can  compare  with  that  of 
the  old  "Sao  Joao"  in  situation,  under  the  deep  colonial  porch,  open  to 
all  the  trade  winds  of  the  blue  Atlantic,  golden-bathed  by  day  and 
silver-lighted  by  night,  lying  a  few  hundred  feet  below  and  stretching 
away  unbrokenly  to  the  coast  of  Africa. 

Masked  figures  came,  asking  for  tickets  in  the  falsetto  they  hoped 
would  disguise  their  voices,  as  well  as  the  usual  haughty,  tar-brushed 
class  in  the  full  dress  of  public  appearance.  I  quickly  acquired  the 
professional  ticket-seller's  "snappy"  language  and  could  toss  out  a 
handful  of  change  or  a  concise  bit  of  information  quite  as  scornfully  as 
the  most  experienced  station-agent  in  my  native  land.  Not  a  great 
many  spectators  entered  that  afternoon,  however,  for  which  I  did  not 
blame  them.  Why  pa)^  to  go  inside  a  musty  old  theater  when  the 
brilliant  summer  day  outside  is  full  of  free  entertainments?  Only 
two  weeks  before  there  had  been  a  similar  celebration,  but  there  is  a 
constant  string  of  this  expensive  tomfoolery  the  year  round  in  Bahia. 
The  amount  spent  on  trolley-car  and  automobile  floats  alone  would  have 
built  a  good  school-house,  to  say  nothing  of  the  bands  of  music,  cos- 
tumes, and  playthings.  Scores  of  automobiles  filled  with  fantastically 
garbed  men  and  girls  crawled  through  the  streets,  while  thousands  afoot 
were  arrayed  in  wild  and  generally  ugly  and  orderless  fantasy,  with 
masks  or  head-pieces  equal  to  Bottom  the  Weaver.  It  was  evident  that 
the  paraders  w^ere  mainly  from  the  lower  classes  and  had  little  original- 
ity of  ideas  in  designing  costumes.  Nearly  everyone's  slight  sense  of 
humor  prompted  him  to  pose  as  the  opposite  of  what  he  was  in  real 
life ;  every  negro  who  could  afford  it  wore  a  rosy-cheeked  mask  and 
white  gloves ;  many  of  the  few  whites  had  blacked  up  or  donned  negro 
masks,  and  perhaps  half  the  men  were  made  up  as  women,  while 
there  was  a  perfect  rage,  particularly  among  the  part-negro  girls,  to 
appear  in  male  attire,  their  hips  bursting  through  their  otherwise  loosely 
flapping  nether  garments.  "Ladies  of  the  life"  took  advantage  of 
the  spirit  of  the  day  and  sat  bare-legged  in  their  balconies  over  the 
main  streets,  the  police,  of  course,  never  interfering,  since  correction 
or  suppression  are  utiusual  and  unpopular   in   South  America.     We 


NORTHWARD  TO  BAHIA  371 

cancelled  the  third  "section"  that  night  and  jcjincd  the  throng  parading 
the  streets  amid  cloud-bursts  of  confetti,  rivers  of  scented  water,  and 
maudlin  uproar,  and  after  looking  -n  at  a  popular  ball  that  had  many 
suggestions  of  a  witch  dance  in  the  heart  of  Africa  I  went  home  for 
my  last  night's  sleep  in  Sao  Salvador  da  Bahia. 


CHAPTER  XVI 


EASTERNMOST   AMERICA 


THE  TxCw  contract  with  "Colonel"  Ruben  permitted  me  to  absent 
myself  from  the  show  and  travel  when  and  where  I  saw  fit, 
he  to  pay  my  transportation  only  by  the  most  direct  routes 
between  the  towns  in  which  the  Kinetophone  appeared.  My  faith  in 
Ruben  was  always  limited  and  my  preference  for  land  over  sea  travel 
notorious,  hence  I  decided  to  strike  off  up-country  a  few  days  before 
the  date  set  for  us  to  sail  for  Maceio,  not  only  to  indulge  my  incurable 
wanderlust  but  to  prepare  for  any  sudden  collapse  of  our  sixty-day 
contract. 

"Chemins  de  Fer  Federaux  de  I'Est  Breslienne"  seemed  as  top- 
heavy  a  name  for  the  narrow  grass-grown  track  up  the  coast  as  the 
mammoth  stacks  made  the  little  old  locomotives.  Its  tiny  cars  were 
designed  for  the  use  of  women  rather  than  men,  for  the  seats,  instead 
of  facing  the  open  windows  and  the  world  outside,  stared  into  mirrors 
set  in  the  car  walls.  We  ground  away  along  the  water,  past  Bomfim, 
topped  by  its  white  "miracle"  church,  past  Itapagipe  beyond  the  widen- 
ing water  with  its  little  sailing  dugout  ferries,  crept  timidly  across  the 
long  and  aged  wooden  trestle  over  this  innermost  arm  of  the  bay,  and 
at  length  lost  Bahia  to  view  just  a  month  from  the  moment  I  had  first 
set  eyes  upon  it. 

There  were  a  dozen  stops  at  languid  little  cocoanut  villages  along 
the  fringe  of  the  inner  bay  before  the  water  gave  way  to  dry  and  bushy 
pasture-land  at  Agoa  Cumprida.  Most  of  the  passengers  changed  there 
for  Santo  Amaro,  and  for  the  rest  of  the  journey  we  had  more  room 
than  company,  which  is  usually  an  advantage  in  Brazil.  Heaps  of  char- 
coal, burned  from  the  scrub  trees  that  abound  in  this  fairly  fertile  but 
dry  and  little  cultivated  region,  lay  at  most  of  the  stations,  at  all  of 
v/hich  throngs  of  men,  women,  and  boys  strove  to  sell  dusty  fruit  and 
home-made  cakes  to  the  apathetic  passengers.  The  dust  lay  thick  upon 
us  also  when  we  drew  up  at  noon  in  Alagoinhas,  eighty  miles  north. 
That  day's  train  was  bound  up-country  to  Joazeiro  on  the  Sao  Fran- 

372 


EASTERNMOST    AMERICA  373 

Cisco  river,  and  it  would  be  twenty-four  hours  before  I  could  continue 
along  the  coast. 

Some  chap  with  a  tendency  for  exaggeration  ha>^  said  that  the  night 
has  a  thousand  eyes ;  but  that  is  nothing  compared  to  almost  any 
interior  village  of  South  America  when  a  white  stranger  comes  strolling 
through  it.  To  walk  the  length  of  a  street  of  Alagoinhas  was  like 
trying  to  stare  down  some  mammoth,  bovine,  fixedly  gaping  face, 
until  a  sensitive  man  could  scarcely  have  refrained  from  screaming, 
"For  Heaven's  sake  go  and  do  something,  or  at  lea.-t  draw  in  your 
stupid  faces!"  Spattered  over  a  lap  of  broken  country  and  half- 
hidden  in  cocoanut  and  palm  groves,  it  would  be  difficult  to  decide  how 
many  of  the  15.000  inhabitants  it  claims  actually  dwell  in  it,  were  it  not 
their  unfailing  custom  to  line  up  to  be  counted.  There  was  not  a 
street  in  town,  which  is  well  inland  and  at  a  slight  elevation,  but  merely 
wide  sloughs  of  sand  between  the  monotonous  rows  of  houses ;  yet  I 
was  astonished  to  find  two  large  and  well-kept  cinemas.  This,  it  turned 
out,  was  due  to  a  local  feud.  Two  brothers  who  owned  the  "Cinema 
Popular"  had  been  bosom  friends  of  the  richest  man  in  town,  until  they, 
too,  bought  an  automobile.  This  so  enraged  the  rich  man  that  he 
attempted  to  get  even  by  building  another  "movie"  house  in  ^e  hope  of 
putting  the  brothers  out  of  business.  So  far  he  had  not  succeeded,  and 
was  all  the  less  likely  to  do  so  after  I  had  signed  a  contract  with  the 
brothers  for  five  nights  at  the  "Popular."  Ruben  might  take  the  show 
to  Maceio  and  Pernambuco  as  he  had  promised,  but  I  did  not  propose 
to  be  caught  napping,  and  if  he  did,  the  Alagoinhas  contract  would  be 
good  in  June  or  July  when  the  Kinetophone  returned  without  me. 

Another  car  so  loose-jointed  that  the  walls  constantly  creaked  and 
swayed  toiled  all  the  afternoon  and  into  the  night  to  carry  a  scattering 
of  passengers  to  Barracao,  another  name  for  Nowhere.  It  consisted 
merely  of  several  huts  and  a  tile-roofed  building  in  which  all  passengers 
by  rail  from  Bahia  to  Aracaju,  or  vice  versa,  must  spend  the  night. 
The  engine,  whistling  up  about  a  cord  of  wood,  awakened  us  long 
before  daylight  and  at  least  an  hour  earlier  than  was  necessary,  for  T 
was  already  sitting  in  our  six  o'clock  train  when  the  other  pulled 
out  Bahia-ward  at  five.  The  same  seat,  the  same  conductor,  and  the 
same  swaying  walls  as  the  day  before  made  one  feel  like  a  trans- 
Siberian  traveler,  though  the  278  miles  the  train  worries  through  in 
two  days  is  scarcely  a  Siberian  distance.  The  salt-tainted  breath  of  the 
Atlantic  slashed  us  now  and  then  in  the  faces  as  we  rumbled  along,  for 
we  were  not  far  inland  now.     It  was  gently  rolling  country,  of  gra> 


374  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

rather  than  red  soil,  producing  next  to  nothing,  with  here  and  there 
some  bananas  and  mandioca,  and  long  unbroken  stretches  of  scrub 
iungle.  The  tiicii,  a  grape-like  fruit  growing  on  a  palm  tree  and  so 
thick  of  skin  and  large  of  stone  that  there  is  only  a  bit  of  sweetish 
dampness  between  them,  was  sold  at  the  rare  stations. 

Soon  we  crossed  an  iron  bridge  and  what  might  have  been  a  river 
had  it  tried  harder,  into  the  State  of  Sergipe,  the  smallest  of  Brazil. 
This  and  the  little  larger  State  of  Alagoas  are  sliced  out  of  the  respective 
states  of  Bahia  and  Pernambuco  down  near  the  mouth  of  the  Sao 
Francisco,  which  divides  them.  It  is  not  apparent  why  they  need 
be  separate  states — but  then,  a  foreigner  ignorant  of  local  conditions 
no  doubt  wonders  in  looking  at  a  map  of  our  own  country  why  a 
little  nubbin  of  land  down  at  the  end  of  Connecticut  must  have  its 
own  name,  capital,  and  government,  or  why  both  those  bits  of  territory 
should  not  join  Massachusetts.  The  state  lines  of  Brazil  follow 
largely  the  old  colonial  divisions,  some  natural  but  more  of  them 
artificial,  set  by  the  Pope  or  the  King  of  Portugal.  Of  the  twenty 
Brazilian  states,  nine  or  ten  have  aboriginal  Indian  names.  It  is 
another  evidence  of  the  higher  value  of  time  to  the  American  that  we 
have  an  abbreviation  for  each  of  our  states,  while  the  Brazilian  has 
none.  North  and  South  American  incompatability  of  temperament 
is  perhaps  nowhere  more  definitely  demonstrated  than  in  the  attitude 
of  the  two  races  toward  time.  Brevity,  conciseness,  and  promptitude 
rank  almost  as  bad  manners  among  Latin-Americans,  whose  editorial 
writers  often  break  forth  in  dissertations  on  "punctuality,  that  virtue 
of  kings  and  bad  custom  of  Anglo-Saxons.  Enthusiasts  for  liberty, 
we  cannot  admit  that  a  man  shall  be  the  slave  of  his  watch.  Life 
proves  that  punctuality  is  an  excellent  virtue  for  a  machine,  but  a 
grave  defect  for  a  man." 

In  the  blazing  afternoon  we  came  down  ofif  the  interior  plateau, 
ever  lower  to  the  northward,  here  reminiscent  of  southern  Texas  or 
northern  Mexico  in  its  aridity,  its  scattered,  thorny,  scrub  plant  life, 
its  occasional  adobe  huts,  to  a  flat  sea-level  littoral  that  was  almost 
entirely  a  dreary  waste  of  snow-white  sand,  rarely  punctuated  with 
cactus  and  a  few  other  waterless  bushes.  Aracaju,  capital  of  the  State 
of  Sergipe,  is  set  in  this  nearly  desert*landscape.  The  large  room  with  a 
mosquito-net  canopied  bed  in  which  I  was  soon  installed  in  the  "Hotel 
International"  was  the  best  the  town  had  to  offer  unbefriended  strangers. 
Like  all  the  rest  of  Aracaju,  it  was  on  the  ground  floor,  looking  out 
on  a  quiet  garden  of  deep  sand,  and  was  as  airy  as  the  exhaust  from  a 


EASTERNMOST    AMERICA  375 

hot-air  furnace.  I  had  already  taken  it  when  niv  eye  fell  upon  a 
notice  to  the  effect  that  for  lack  of  water  guests  would  not  be  allowed  to 
bathe  for  three  days.  By  shouting  until  the  whole  hotel  force  wa^. 
gathered  about  me,  and  offering  to  make  them  all  candidates  for  hospital 
treatment,  I  was  conducted,  as  a  special  favor  to  another  of  those  half- 
mad  "gringos,"  into  a  special  "rain  bath"  for  ladies,  and  freed  myself  at 
last  from  the  soil  of  Bahia.  Then,  having  induced  the  landlord  to 
change  the  wooden-floored  bed  for  one  "of  wire,"  though  he  could  not 
understand  why  anyone  should  consider  this  an  improvement,  I  relaxed 
and  sallied  forth  to  see  what  Aracajii  had  to  offer. 

Sergipe,  it  seems,  was  a  part  of  Bahia  until  nearly  the  end  of  the 
colonial  period,  when  it  proclaimed  itself  a  sovereign  state  with  the 
capital  at  Sao  Cristovam,  a  straggling  town  some  twenty  miles  back 
along  the  railway  by  which  I  had  come.  But  that  was  a  league  from  a 
harbor,  and  the  government  at  length  moved  to  an  Indian  village  on 
the  edge  of  this  cucumber-shaped  bay.  Ara  is  a  Tupi  Indian  word  for 
plenty,  and  cajii  is  the  Brazilian  name  for  a  fruit  that  thrives  in  such 
semi-desert  regions  as  the  littoral  of  Sergipe.  This  is  shaped  like  a 
small  plump  pear,  with  a  smooth  silky  skin  of  safifron  or  brilliant  red 
color,  which  grows  upside  down  on  a  tree  not  unlike  tlie  apple  in 
appearance,  and  is  particularly  conspicuous  for  the  fact  that  the  seed, 
shaped  like  a  parrot's  beak,  gray  in  color,  and  containing  a  nut  that  is 
delicious  when  roasted,  grows  entirely  outside  the  fruit  itself,  protrud- 
ing from  its  larger  end.  The  meat  is  white,  exceedingly  acid,  and 
sure  death  alike  to  thirst  and  the  dye-stuff  of  garments.  There  w'ere 
barely  a  dozen  Indian  fishermen's  huts  at  Aracaju  when  it  became  the 
capital  in  1S55;  hence  it  has  an  appearance  of  newness  rather  than  age. 
and  only  two  churches — (juite  sufticient,  to  be  sure,  but  a  great  contrast 
to  Bahia.  There  is  nothing  particularly  individual  about  the  place, 
its  "palaces,"  houses,  or  people,  who  arc  sufficient  for  all  the  Lord 
meant  them  to  be  in  this  world  and  very  few  of  whom  are  going  to 
the  next,  if  I  may  judge  by  the  size  of  the  congregation  and  the  priestly 
remarks  thereon  at  early  mass  the  morning  after  my  arrival. 

The  predominating  type  of  aracajuano  is  the  gray  or  brown  mcsti<;o, 
and  a  mixed  race  is  rarely  prepossessing  in  appearance.  There  are  few 
full  negroes,  even  fewer  pure  whites,  but  every  known  mixture  of  the 
two,  no  small  number  of  ]namclucos,  or  crosses  between  Indians  and 
Europeans,  and  too  many  bodes  (literally  male  goats)  as  the  offspring 
of  Indian  and  negro  are  clandestinely  called.  The  cucumber-shaped 
bay  is  really  the  River  Sery-gipe,  a  name  said  to  mean  the  abode  of  a 


J76  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

kind  of  shrimp  which  abounds  here,  and  has  a  troublesome  moving 
sandbar  at  its  mouth,  with  less  than  four  meters  depth  at  low  tide, 
making  Aracajii  the  only  Brazilian  coast  capital  which  transatlantic 
steamers  cannot  enter.  One  may  see  the  waves  breaking  on  this  bar 
from  almost  any  point  in  town,  but  the  open  sea  is  in  view  only  from 
the  top  of  the  cathedral  or  the  crest  of  the  highest  sand-dunes.  Half 
the  coast  of  Sergipe  is  made  up  of  this  snow-white  sand,  in  dunes  that 
move  with  the  wind,  immense  heaps  of  the  purest  white  sand  covering 
whole  blocks  and  rising  a  hundred  feet  or  more  high  within  two  minutes' 
stroll  of  the  main  hotel.  All  but  a  very  few  of  the  streets  are  ankle- 
deep  in  sand,  as  are  the  palm-trees.  These  few  are  paved  with  large 
flat  rocks  fitted  together  in  all  manner  of  irregular  patterns.  The 
"bonds"  were  still  operated  by  mule-power.  There  is  a  pleasing  central 
praca,  facing  the  waterfront  and  backed  by  a  little  garden  with  a  vista 
of  the  cathedral  through  royal  palms,  pleasing  perhaps  because  its  bit 
of  green  lawn  is  in  such  welcome  contrast  to  the  glaring  sandy  bright- 
ness elsewhere,  but  marred  by  the  statue  of  some  local  hero  who,  accord- 
ing to  this  monument,  stepped  out  of  somewhere  wearing  a  frock-coat 
and  waving  a  most  properly  creased  soft  felt  hat,  crying,  "I  am  going 
to  die  for  my  country!"  If  he  could  see  it  now  he  might  regret  his 
heroism. 

In  full  sunlight  at  midday  I  could  have  used  my  umbrella  to  advantage 
as  a  parasol,  if  some  miserable  son  of  a  Brazilian  had  not  stolen  it  in 
Victoria.  But  he  who  never  walks  in  tropical  sunshine  will  never 
enjoy  to  the  full  sitting  in  the  shade,  and  at  least  the  nights  were  cool 
and  breezy.  The  only  thing  to  grow  profane  over  was  that  the  steamer 
which  was  to  carry  me  to  Maceio  had  not  even  left  Bahia,  "because 
everybody  there  is  busy  with  the  carnival."  This  meant  at  least  three 
days  squatting  among  the  sand  heaps,  and  perhaps  not  reaching  Maceio 
until  after  the  show  did,  since  that  was  to  travel  by  direct  steamer. 
Worse  still,  I  had  read  all  the  Brazilian  novels  in  my  bag,  and  Aracaju 
was  not  the  kind  of  place  to  support  a  book-store.  There  was  nothing 
left  but  walking,  and  that  soon  palls  in  a  sun-glazed  town  closely  sur- 
rounded on  all  sides  by  shoe-filling  sand-dunes. 

This  dreary  and  unproductive  soil  stretches  from  five  to  ten  miles 
inland  for  the  whole  length  of  the  state,  with  a  broad  strip  of  stony, 
rolling,  clay  soil  back  of  that,  on  which  sugar  and  cotton,  tobacco  and 
farinha  are  produced  in  moderate  quantity,  while  the  western  half  of 
the  state  is  sertao,  in  which  graze  scattered  herds  of  cattle.  There  is  a 
large  weaving-mill  in  the  capital,  said  to  be  the  best  in  Brazil,  but  still 


EASTERNMOST   AMERICA  377 

capable  of  improvement.  During  my  strolls  I  came  upon  the  slaughter- 
house one  afternoon  and  found  scores  of  children  showing  great 
glee  at  the  struggles  of  the  cattle  as  the  blood  poured  from  their  throats 
until  they  dropped  in  their  own  gore.  Such  was  evidently  the  chief 
education  to  be  had  by  youthful  Aracaju.  Here,  as  in  the  other  tobacco 
producing  state,  Bahia,  most  of  the  negro  women  smoked  pipes.  The 
lazy  scrape  of  tamancos  u-as  suggestive  not  only  of  the  indolence  but 
of  the  moral  looseness  of  the  place.  Though  one  might  have  had  the 
companionship  of  comely  mulatto  and  quadroon  girls  for  less  than  the 
asking,  I  sought  in  vain  for  a  person  of  even  the  rudiments  of  in- 
telligence with  whom  to  pass  the  time,  and  was  forced  to  take  refuge 
in  the  state  public  library  instead.  Even  this  was  no  monument  of 
learning,  though  several  scrgiponos  have  won  Brazilian  fame  as  men 
of  letters.  The  building  itself  lacked  nothing  in  elaborateness,  but  the 
books  were  those  least  needed  and  only  half  a  dozen  youths  drifted  in" 
daily  to  read  the  newspapers  and  the  silly  "comic"  vv^eeklies  from  Rio. 
Here,  however,  I  learned  that  "there  are  two  kinds  of  climate  in  the 
State  of  Sergipe^iot  and  humid  on  the  coast  and  hot  and  dry  in 
the  interior,"  and  that  the  bronze  gentleman  in  the  frock-coat  and 
Parisian  hat  iti  the  main  praga  was  a  "politician,  a  poet,  and  a  great 
orator"  who  tried  to  start  a  revolution  here  in  1906  and  was  (|uite 
naturally  shot  full  of  holes  by  federal  soldiers.  No  one  can  blame 
him,  however,  for  wanting  to  start  something  in  Aracaju;  his  foolish- 
ness lay  in  the  fact  that  he  seemed  to  think  it  was  possible. 

A  two-line  cable  or  two  a  week,  usually  on  trivial  matters  and  more 
likely  than  not  denied  a  few  days  later,  constituted  Sergipe's  connection 
with  the  outside  world.  No  doubt  I  needed  the  experience  to  realize 
how  dreary  life  is  in  these  miserable  little  capitals  when  one  cannot 
hurry  on  as  soon  as  the  first  interest  and  novelty  has  worn  off. 
The  total  lack  of  inspiration,  of  good  example,  of  anj-thing  approaching 
an  ideal,  could  not  but  have  killed  any  originality  or  ambition,  even 
had  one  of  these  half-breed  youths  been  born  with  one  or  the  other. 
There  was  no  goal  in  life.  Even  I  felt  that  in  my  few  days  there; 
how  must  it  have  been  with  a  person  born  there  and  suspecting  no 
other  life  on  the  globe?  A  man  may  advance  under  his  own  gasoline, 
hut  unless  he  has  someone  to  crank  him  up  he  is  very  apt  to  die  about 
where  he  began.    Few  of  us  are  ecjuippcd  with  self-starters. 

Such  reflections  as  these  made  me  wonder  soiuetimes  whether  the 
moving  picture,  for  all  its  imperfections  and  dangers  and  false  view 
of  life,  for  all  the  peculiar  inanity  and  childishness  inherent  in  its  dramas, 


3/8  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

is  not  doing  as  much  as  anything  to  give  the  masses  of  South  America, 
particularly  of  the  interior,  at  least  a  knowledge  of  better  personal 
habits,  even  if  not  higher  aspirations.  Much  as  this  remarkable  inven- 
tion has  been  prostituted  by  cheap  mortals,  it  is  an  incredible  boon  to 
communities  so  far  from  civilization  that  they  never  get  more  of  the 
great  outside  world  than  the  films  bring  them.  If  you  lived  in  some 
sleepy  little  village  in  a  remote  corner  of  South  America,  far  from 
theaters  or  any  other  living  form  of  life  and  thought,  you  would  find 
the  daily  round  exceedingly  dull,  you  would  passionately  crave  some 
variety,  some  entertainment,  even  mildly  intellectual,  or  not  at  all  so, 
something  to  take  you  for  an  hour  out  of  the  dreary  village  routine  of 
a  lifetime  and  bring  you  in  touch,  if  ever  so  slightly  and  momentarily, 
with  the  great  moving  outside  world.  Thus  you  would  welcome  with 
considerable  enthusiasm  even  a  bad  "movie" — unless  generations  of  this 
life  had  so  sunk  you  in  sloth  that  you  resented  any  attempt  to  drag  you 
out  of  it. 

But  though  the  "Cinema  Rio  Branco,"  otherwise  the  state-owned 
"Theatro  Carlos  Gomes,"  in  the  next  block  was  free  to  me,  I  found  that 
Ut  best  a  stupid  way  for  a  man  from  the  outside  world  to  spend  his 
time.  Some  of  that  on  my  hands  I  had  whiled  away  by  booking  the 
Kinetophone  for  three  to  seven  days  on  its  return  trip  to  Rio,  we — or 
rather,  they,  for  by  that  time  I  should  be  far  distant — to  wire  the 
manager  at  least  five  days  before  their  arrival.  Thus  I  proposed  to  make 
a  string  of  contracts  for  "Tut's"  return  trip,  and  leave  my  duty  doubly 
done  when  I  doffed  my  movie-magnate  hat  up  on  the  Amazon. 

One  morning  I  was  rowed  across  the  river,  or  harbor,  in  a  dugout  and 
tramped  for  hours  in  the  sand-carpeted  forest  of  cocoanut-palms  on 
the  Ilha  dos  Coqueiros.  It  was  market-day  in  the  town,  and  boat-loads 
of  the  nuts  were  coming  across  to  compete  with  other  native  products 
from  farther  up  the  river.  The  wind  was  sighing  through  the  cocoanut 
fronds,  and  I  discovered  that  there  are  windfalls  among  cocoanuts  also, 
for  there  were  so  many  large  green  ones  under  the  trees  that  I  had  only 
to  stop  and  drink  as  often  as  I  got  thirsty.  Numbers  of  them  rot 
around  the  edge  of  the  stem  and  fall,  and  if  they  are  not  soon  picked 
up,  the  decay  penetrates  the  shell  and  the  nut  spills  its  milk  in  the  sand, 
leaving  only  the  husk  to  be  used  as  fuel  or  roofing.  Even  here  one  was 
reminded  of  the  human  race.  The  high  trees  of  aristocratic  arrogance 
ordinarily  had  only  half  a  dozen  nuts,  while  the  sturdy,  ugly,  short  and 
squatty  ones  bore  from  fifty  to  a  hundred  in  tight  clusters  at  the  hub 
from  which  the  leaves  radiate  in  all  directions.    A  group  of  inhabitants 


EASTERNMOST   AMERICA  379 

scattered  along  the  near  side  of  the  island  lived  in  cocoanut  husk-and- 
leaf  huts  and  produced,  besides  their  staple,  which  grows  itself,  mandi- 
oca,  melons,  and  children,  all  equally  weedy  and  ill-tended.  Everyone 
above  the  age  of  ten  or  twelve  seemed  to  have  his  dugout  log,  a  paddle, 
a  square  sail,  and  a  trailing-board,  all  guarded  in  his  hut  when  not  in 
use,  and  a  bright-eyed  bron/^e  boy  of  part  Indian  ancestry  sailed  me 
back  across  the  harbor  in  a  snapping  sea  breeze. 

The  dugouts  and  fishermen's  sailboats  that  always  stretch  along  the 
waterfront  of  Aracajii  had  been  augmented  by  a  steamer,  the  long- 
awaited  Itlicos  of  the  "Companhia  Bahiana  de  Navegaqao,"  which  had 
at  last  drifted  over  the  sandbar  at  the  harbor's  mouth.  I  hastened  to 
the  company's  ofiice,  only  to  be  struck  in  the  eye  by  a  sign  headed  "23 
a  6  horas,"  in  other  words,  it  being  then  Saturday,  the  Ilheos  would  not 
sail  until  Tuesday  morning!  By  that  time  the  Kinetophone  would  long 
since  have  left  Maceio,  even  if  good  "Colonel"  Ruben  did  not  run  away 
with  the  whole  concern  during  my  prolonged  absence.  If  only  the  sea 
had  frozen  over  I  could  have  walked  it  in  far  less  time  than  there  was 
still  to  wait,  for  it  was  only  105  miles  to  Maceio.  But  it  would  have 
been  many  times  that  in  this  sand,  and  there  was  no  other  way  oi  cover- 
ing the  only  break  in  railway  travel — except  the  one  between  Victoria 
and  Bahia — along  the  whole  eastern  coast  of  South  yVmerica. 

The  trouble  was,  it  turned  out,  that  Aracaju  had  next  day  to  inaugu- 
rate a  new  bishop,  the  first  "son  of  Sergipe"  ever  to  rise  to  that  honor, 
and  of  course  Monday  would  be  needed  to  recover  from  the  celebration. 
The  archbishop  of  Bahia,  the  bishop  of  Maceio.  and  a  swarm  of  lesser 
wearers  of  the  black  robe  had  come  to  add  dignity  to  the  occasion,  and, 
when  I  came  to  think  of  it,  of  course  it  was  they  who  were  holding  up 
the  steamer.  Eight  on  Sunday  morning  found  me  at  the  egreja  matrix, 
or  mother  church,  mingling  with  many  pious  negroes  ready  to  give  the 
new  bishop  a  proper  send-off.  But  the  edifice  was  already  filled  to  about 
seven  times  its  capacity  with  people  chiefly  of  color,  and  I  withdrew 
hastily  to  windward  and  a  park  bench.  By  Monday  afternoon  re- 
covery from  the  inauguration  set  in,  and  I  ventured  to  buy  my  steamer- 
ticket,  took  my  last  wade  in  the  sands  of  Aracaju,  and  went  on  board 
for  the  night.  The  bishop  of  Alagoas  had  the  next  cabin  to  my  own 
and  we  slept  with  our  heads  against  opposite  sides  of  the  same  half- 
inch  partition.  But  I  suppose  it  was  because  I  had  no  little  purple 
dunce-cap  to  wear  over  my  bald  spot  that  the  dusky  ladies  of  Aracaju 
did  not  come,  glistening  with  jewels  embedded  in  their  well-fed  forms, 
to  kiss  me  good-night — on  the  hand. 


38o  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

We  began  to  move  at  four  in  the  morning,  and  I  went  out  to  watch  by 
the  light  of  half  a  moon  and  the  Southern  Cross  our  exit  from  one  of 
the  most  difficult  ports  in  South  America.  Barely  had  we  crossed  the 
bar  when  our  sea-going  tug  began  to  rock  like  a  canoe,  and  not  only 
the  bishop  but  even  as  old  a  seadog  as  I  took  no  interest  in  the  ten 
o'clock  "breakfast."  The  Ilheos  claimed  to  have  twin  screws,  but  they 
must  have  been  turning  in  opposite  directions,  for  we  made  far  less  speed 
than  the  coast  swells  that  rolled  us  about  like  an  empty  bottle.  The 
shore  was  made  up  almost  entirely  of  dreary  wastes  of  white  sand, 
sometimes  in  broad  flat  stretches,  sometimes  drifted  up  into  dunes. 
At  times  a  suggestion  of  forest  appeared  far  back  of  this,  but  there  were 
few  if  any  signs  of  habitation. 

About  noon  the  water  about  us  turned  from  deep  blue  to  a  muddy 
red,  a  great  streak  of  which  thrust  itself  out  into  the  ocean  from  the 
outlet  of  the  River  Sao  Francisco.  We  turned  into  this  across  a  broad 
sand-bar  and  found  it  a  mile  or  more  wide,  though  frequently  split  up 
by  islands,  long,  flat,  and  green.  This  river,  largest  between  the  Plata 
and  the  Amazon,  rises  far  to  the  south,  near  the  old  capital  of  Minas 
Geraes,  and  has  about  the  same  volume  of  water  as  the  Hudson. 
Thatched  villages  and  small  cities  line  its  banks  for  hundreds  of  miles 
and  side-wheel  river  steamers  mount  it  in  two  sections,  to  Pirapora,  in 
Minas  Geraes,  terminus  of  the  "Central  Railway  of  Brazil,"  We  stopped 
at  several  villages  near  the  mouth,  then  pushed  on  inland.  The  rolling 
had  ceased  and  the  bishop  was  out  now  parading  the  deck  behind  a  big 
black  cigar.  The  shores  were  sandy  and  nearly  flat,  with  palm-trees, 
some  sugar-cane,  and  a  considerable  population  of  more  or  less  negroes. 
At  length  the  town  of  Villa  Nova,  two  centuries  old  for  a'l  its  name, 
appeared  on  the  nose  of  a  blufif,  and  beyond,  on  the  ri~ht-band  or 
Alsgoas  bank,  the  city  of  Penedo,  not  unlike  a  smaller  Bahia  in  situa- 
tion, with  several  bulking  old  churches  and  here  and  there  a  majestic 
imperial  palm-tree  rising  above  all  else. 

We  dropped  anchor  before  Villa  Nova,  with  its  several  textile  mills, 
and  were  soon  completely  hemmed  in  by  cargo  barges,  though  not 
before  I  had  slipped  across  to  Penedo,  from  which  we  were  to  sail  at 
four  m  the  morning.  Considering  the  time  it  had  taken  to  get  there,  it 
was  hard  to  believe  that  this  was  only  forty-five  miles  north  of  Aracaju ! 
Before  the  town  lay  one  of  the  side-wheel  river  steamers,  and  many 
"chatties,"  barges,  and  sailboats,  not  to  menti'^n  countless  du^^out  canoes, 
which  ply  the  lower  Sao  Francisco  to  the  falls  of  Paulo  Affonso,  two 
hundred  miles  up  and  "greater  than  Niagara,"  according  to  my  fellow- 


EASTERNMOST   AMERICA  381 

passengers.  Here  and  there  groups  of  women  were  dipping  up  water 
and  washing  garments,  in  the  same  spots.  All  the  dwellers  along  its 
shore  drink  the  muddy  Sao  Francisco,  nature,  or  at  hest  filtered  through 
a  porous  stone.  No  one  is  ever  seen  swimming  in  these  parts,  either  in 
river  or  sea. 

I  was  surprised  to  find  a  large  number  of  white  people  in  Penedo, 
though  mulattoes  were  in  the  majoriiy.  There  was  some  Indian  blood, 
shown  chiefly  in  high  cheek-bones  and  wide  faces,  and  as  usual  there 
was  a  bij  '  "  full  of  happy  singing  negroes.  Full-white  brats  rolling 
stark  nakeu  m  the  mud  suggested  one  of  the  unfortunate  effects  of 
living  in  a  mainly  negro  country.  Some  streets  climbed  laboriously 
past  overgrown  old  churches  with  Portuguese  crowns  cut  in  stone  on 
them,  past  projecting  balconies  that  carried  the  mind  back  to  viceregal 
days,  to  the  grass-grown  central  praga  high  up  on  the  ridge,  over- 
looking a  long  stretch  of  the  red-brown  river.  It  was  the  affair  of  a 
moment  to  convince  the  owner  of  the  "Theatro  Sete  de  Setembro," 
alias  "Cinema  Ideal,"  that  the  Kinetophone  should  halt  here  for  three 
days  on  its  return  trip.  He  was  the  big  man  of  the  town,  with  a  dozen 
separate  enterprises,  and  when  a  score  of  persons  crowded  around  us 
in  his  drugstore  to  listen  to  our  conversation  and  read  over  his  shoulder 
whatever  I  showed  him,  we  agreed  to  leave  the  signing  of  the  contract 
for  the  next  day  on  board  the  Ilhcos,  on  which  he,  too,  was  to  take 
passage. 

Anarchy  reigned  about  the  decks  all  night,  sailors,  stokers,  and  visit- 
ing parties  from  shore  keeping  up  a  constant  hubbub  until  we  got  under 
way  about  dawn.  A  couple  of  hours  sleep  as  we  descended  the  river 
were  cut  short  as  we  struck  the  open  sea,  for  though  this  looked  calm 
and  smooth  as  a  frog  pond,  the  Ilheos  rolled  like  a  log  and  soon  took  on 
the  aspect  of  a  phantom  ship,  with  everyone  lying  like  dead  wherever 
misfortune  overtook  them.  The  dreary  sandy  coast  was  sometimes  bro- 
ken b\-  spurs  of  the  low,  f^at,  wooded  plateau  that  stretches  all  along  this 
region  farther  inland.  At  two  in  the  afternoon  we  sighted  Maceio 
and  its  port  of  Jaragua,  a  smaller  city  far  out  on  a  point  of  land,  with 
a  reef  protecting  a  scallop  in  the  coast  but  no  real  harbor.  In  one  of 
the  score  of  sailboats  that  rushed  out  to  meet  us  I  was  astonished  to  see 
Carlos  and  later  "Tut,"  whoin  I  supposed  already  in  Pernambuco. 
They  had  lost  Wednesday  and  Thursday  of  the  week  before  in  getting 
here,  had  played  four  days  to  tolerable  business,  and  had  lost  the  night 
just  past  in  waiting  for  the  boat  they  now  expected  to  take  at  any 
moment. 


382  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

I  took  "Tut's"  room  at  the  "Hotel  Petropolis,"  a  massive,  one-story 
building  on  a  sort  of  terrace  that  caught  a  bit  of  breeze  and  on  the  sides 
of  which  were  painted  letters  several  feet  high  announcing  it  the  "Only 
Place  in  IMaceio  without  Mosquitoes."  It  had  little  of  anything  else, 
for  ihat  matter,  except  good  mosquito-nets  over  the  beds  to  keep  out  the 
mosquitoes  it  did  not  have.  By  dark  the  "Lloyd-Brazileiro"  steamer 
Bahia  arrived,  and  "Tut"  and  Carlos  and  Ruben's  mulatto  sub-manager 
sailed  away,  while  I  went  over  to  the  theater  in  which  they  had  played 
and  contracted  not  only  for  three  days  on  their  return  trip,  but  for  five 
days  in  Parahyba,  capital  of  the  state  north  of  Pernambuco.  How  hard 
Maceio  had  been  hit  by  the  prevailing  hard  times  was  suggested  on 
every  hand,  not  only  in  out-of-works  and  light  cinema  receipts,  but  by 
such  posted  information  as : 

NOTICE 

On  this  date  our  telephone  was  disconnected  from  the  respective  Company 
until  our  further  orders,  in  view  of  the  hrutal  crisis  which  at  the  present  time. 
atrophies  ever>'thing  and  everyone. 

Maceio,  January  1,  1915.  Joao  Ramos  e  Cia. 

The  capital  of  Alagoas,  however,  proved  to  be  more  of  a  city  than 
it  looks  from  a  distance.  Most  of  it  lies  in  a  pocket  between  the  sea 
and  a  ridge,  a  large,  almost  land-locked  bay  running  far  in  behind  it. 
Mainly  three-story  buildings  lined  the  well-paved  streets  in  the  business 
section,  and  new  American  street-cars  of  the  electric  "Companhia  Ala- 
goana  de  Trilhos  Urbanos"  covered  several  pleasant  suburbs.  No 
sooner,  however,  does  one  return  to  a  region  of  railways  and  street 
cars  than  missing  arms  and  legs  begin  to  appear.  The  people  of  Maceio 
were  visibly  of  higher  class  than  those  of  the  State  of  Bahia,  though  by 
no  means  beyond  possible  improvetnent.  Even  the  outskirt  huts  were 
whitewashed  and  often  noticeably  clean,  and  women  and  children,  and 
even  men,  in  inany  cases  wore  spotless  white  garments.  Heaps  of 
cotton  bales  at  the  railway  station  and  on  the  wharves  reminded  one 
of  our  own  South,  but  though  there  was  ample  evidence  of  African 
ancestry,  there  were  almost  no  full-blooded  negroes  among  the  popula- 
tion. The  percentage  of  white  and  near-white  inhabitants  was  striking 
after  Bahia ;  but  here,  too,  were  the  familiar  north-Brazil  concomitants 
of  huge  churches  and  tiny  one-room  schools.  Mangos  and  bread-fruit 
dropped  in  the  central  praga,  amid  the  myriad  remains  of  tropical  bugs 
lured  to  death  by  its  blazing  electric-lights. 

My  only  personal  acquaintance  with  the  elite  of  Maceio  was  due  to 
professional  duties.     When  the  show  arrived,  "Tut"  had  discovered 


EASTERNMOST    AMERICA  383 

that  the  local  eleclrichy  was  of  a  freak  type, — 100  volts  and  100  cycles, 
whatever  that  means — a  sort  of  non-union  electricity  evidently,  for  all 
our  phonograph  motors  refused  to  work  with  it.  The  English  engineer 
at  the  power-house  figured  out  on  paper  that  all  would  he  well,  but  as  the 
"juice"  is  not  turned  on  in  Maceio  until  6  i'.  m.,  his  error  was  discov- 
ered only  when  the  audience  was  storming  tlie  doors  on  the  opening 
night.  While  the  manager  strove  to  keep  the  house  amused  with  ordi- 
nary films,  "Tut"  and  Carlos  raced  about  town  and  at  last  found  in  a 
cafe  a  little  electric  fan.  They  borrowed  the  motor  that  operatecl  it, 
but  this  had  to  be  cleaned  and  oiled  before  it  would  take  up  its  new  task, 
so  that  it  was  nine  o'clock  before  our  part  of  the  show  was  given ;  and 
as  Maceio  usually  goe'3  to  bed  by  eight,  Ruben  had  to  give  back  much 
of  the  money,  and  the  bungled  cstrca  injured  business  during  the  rest  of 
our  stay.  It  turned  out  that  the  cafe  and  the  fan  belonged,  sub  rosa,  to 
one  Dr.  Armando  Vedigal,  a  w-ell-to-do  lawyer  and  member  of  one  of 
MaceicVs  "best  families."  True  to  his  race,  as  well  as  to  his  calling, 
this  gentleman,  finding  he  had  someone  in  a  tight  place,  proceeded  to 
squeeze  him.  He  demanded  100$  for  the  use  of  the  motor  for  four 
nights,  of  at  most  thirty  minutes  each.  The  whole  fan  costs  six  to 
eight  dollars  new  in  the  United  States,  and  perhaps  35$  in  Brazil; 
and  as  its  perfection  was  mainly  due  to  Edison,  it  amounted  almost  to 
refiting  an  apparatus  for  tw'o  hours'  use  to  the  inventor  thereof  at  three 
times  Its  original  cost. 

"Tut"  had  left  the  payment  to  me.  Unfortunately  I  could  not 
ignore  it,  as  I  should  have  preferred,  because  the  lawyer  was  a  political 
power  and  would  have  made  it  unpleasant  for  the  owner  of  the  theater 
unless  his  "rake-off"  was  forthcoming,  so  the  only  American  thing  to 
do  was  to  pay  what  he  demanded.  I  determined,  however,  to  have  at 
least  the  satisfaction  of  expressing  our  gratitude  to  the  fellow  in  person, 
and  after  considerable  insisting  I  was  shown  the  way  to  his  house.  It 
wa?  an  ostentatious  one  enclosed  in  a  large  private  garden  in  the  best 
part  of  town  and  filled  with  those  things  into  which  persons  of  wealth 
and  "social  standing"  the  w^orld  round  turn  the  proceeds  of  such  clever 
"strokes  of  business."  The  great  man  received  me  with  a  dignity  be- 
fitting his  lofty  station,  and  invited  me  into  his  chair- forested  parlor. 
He  had  the  dainty  aristocratic  fingers,  hands,  and  form  of  those  who, 
for  generations  back,  have  taken  good  care  not  to  let  their  muscles 
develop,  lest  someone  suspect  them  of  having  once  earned  a  dollar  by 
vulgar  work,  and  he  was  dressed  in  the  very  proper  heavy,  black,  full 
frock-coat  dress  of  his  class,  even  on  the  equator. 


384  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

I  began  by  expressing  our  thanks  for  the  use  of  the  motor,  to  which 
he  instantly  replied,  "Ah,  to  be  sure,  I  was  so  dehghted  to  be  able  to 
serve  you,  and — and " 

He  was  plainly  waiting  for  me  to  encourage  him  with,  "Yes,  that 
was  so  kind  of  you"  and  a  gentle  pat  on  the  shoulder,  instead  of  the 
swift  kick  farther  down  which  he  so  richly  deserved.  I  bowed,  and 
took  to  expressing  in  the  most  polished  Portuguese  I  could  summon 
my  admiration  for  a  man  who  had  the  nerve  to  demand  several  times 
the  price  of  a  machine  for  such  a  brief  use  of  it.  I  had  intended  to 
work  him  up  slowly  to  the  point  where  my  remarks  would  feel  like  the 
threshing  of  nettles  on  a  bare  skin,  but  the  men  of  northern  Brazil  are 
dynamic  with  pride  and  quick  to  flare  up  at  any  suggested  s'ight,  so  that 
I  had  barely  reached  the  word  roiibar  (rob),  first  of  a  long  and  cul- 
minative  list  with  a  sting,  when  he  bounded  into  the  air  and  asked  if  I 
really  knew  the  meaning  of  that  word  in  Portuguese.  I  assured  him 
that  I  did,  and  the  action,  too,  in  any  land  or  clime,  whereupon  he  de- 
manded in  a  neighbor-waking  voice  whether  I  had  come  to  call  him  a 
thief  in  his  own  house.  When  I  informed  him  that  I  had  come  for 
that  express  purpose,  he  bellowed,  "Rua!  Off  with  you!  Out  of  my 
sight,"  at  the  same  time  hastening  to  pick  my  hat  off  the  rack  and  hand 
it  to  me.  I  v/as  going  anyway,  now  that  he  had  caught  my  hint,  but  I 
did  not  propose  to  let  his  wrath  hasten  matters.  As  I  stepped  leisurely 
out  upon  the  veranda  he  slammed  the  door  and  informed  me  in  the 
bellow  of  a  mad  bull  that  he  would  "pay  me  back" — not  the  100$ 
unfortunately — "the  first  time  he  met  me  on  the  street — to-morrow !" 

"Why  not  to-day?"  I  queried,  for  it  was  barely  dusk  and  there  were 
street-cars,  if  it  was  beneath  his  dignity  to  walk. 

This  redoubled  his  fury.  "Era  uma  fita" — it  was  a  regular  movie, 
as  the  Brazilians  say,  to  see  him  giving  an  impersonation  of  a  fire-eater 
for  the  benefit  of  his  wife  and  children,  and  shouting,  "Let  me  at  him ! 
Let  me  eat  him !"  while  his  wife  and  three  small  sons  clung  to  his  arms, 
legs,  and  other  appendages,  screaming  the  Brazilian  form  of,  "Don't 
kill  him,  Pa!  Oh,  don't  shoot  him,  for  my  sake!"  He  al'owed  the 
pistol  he  had  caught  up  to  be  wrested  from  his  hand,  but  the  howls  and 
screams  of  the  whole  family  could  still  be  heard  when  I  turned  the  next 
corner — and  I  was  not  running  at  that. 

It  was  playing  with  fire,  of  course,  not  because  these  hot-headed 
northerners  are  particularly  brave,  but  because  of  the  disadvantage 
which  a  stranger  and  a  foreigner  would  have  in  any  contest  with  a  pow- 
erful local  politician.    Had  he  shot  me,  it  would  probably  not  have  been 


EASTERNMOST    AMERICA  38s 

difficult  for  him  to  "fix  it"  to  escape  punishment,  whereas  the  reverse 
would  almost  certainly  have  meant  many  years  in  an  unpleasant  climate. 
I  was  too  exasperated  to  consider  these  things  at  the  time,  however, 
and  having  returned  to  the  mosquitoless  hotel  and  strapped  on  my 
revolver,  I  spent  the  evening  hanging  about  the  cinema,  the  town 
billiard-room,  and  the  other  nightly  gathering-places  where  a  "gentle- 
man" with  such  a  debt  might  come  to  pay  it ;  but  the  lawyer's  strength 
must  have  been  unequal  to  that  of  his  frenzied  wife  and  children,  for  I 
saw  no  more  of  him  during  my  stay  in  Maceio. 

The  "GAV.B.R.,"  or  Great  Western  of  Brazil  Railway,  is  English, 
which  accounts  for  its  being  so  called,  though  it  nms  from  Maceio  to 
Natal  through  the  easternmost  part  of  the  four  easternmost  states  in 
the  western  hemisphere.     On  the  first  day  of  the  month  in  which  I 
arrived  daily  service  had  been  inaugurated  between  Maceio  and  Per- 
nambuco,   but  lack  of   coal  was   making  it   impossible   to   keep   this 
up  and  the  line  was  soon  to  go  back  to  the  old  schedule  of  three  trains 
a  week.     In  other  words,  I  had  accidentally  chosen  just  the  time  to 
spare  myself  another  day  in  the  capital  of  Alagoas.     The  train  that 
left  at  dawn  on  the  225-mile  run  was  long  and  heavy,  with  all  reason- 
able comforts  and  many  minor  evidences   of   English   management, 
among  them  the  habit  of  being  on  time.     This  line  is  a  part  of  the 
786  miles  leased   for  sixty  years  to  the  British  corporation  by  the 
government,  and  the  contract  reads  that  no  rental  shall  be  paid  for 
it  until  the  gross  income  for  all  of  them  exceeds  6,200$  per  kilometer, 
after  which  ten  per  cent,  of  the  receipts  shall  be  paid  into  the  public 
treasury.     The  result  is  a  problem  similar  to  that  on  the  line  from 
Sao   Paulo  to   Santos.     One   million   pounds   sterling   was   spent   to 
improve  the  leased  lines,  but  even  that  would  not  have  been  enough 
had  the  company  not  been  so  fortunate,  as  the  chairman  of  the  stock- 
holders in  London  told  them,  as  to  have  had  a  partial   failure  of 
crops  along  their  lines   that   year  and  to  have  been   thereby   saved 
from  contributing  £36,000  to  the  government!     The  largest  expense 
of  the  company  is  for  coal  and  its  largest  income  from  the  hauling 
of   sugar,   with   second-class   passengers  next,   according   to   an   item 
in  the  official  report  headed  "Passenger  and  Live  Stock  Transporta- 
tion."    No  doubt  it  would  be  hard  to  separate  the  two  in  Brazil. 

The  line  to  Pernambuco  ran  well  inland  through  a  dry  and  dusty 
but  fertile  land,  varying  from  rolling  to  big  rounded  hills,  among  which 
the  train  wandered  back  and  forth  seeking  an  outlet.  In  places  it 
was  somewhat   forested,   or   seemed   recently   to   have  been  cleared; 


386  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

but  most  of  it  was  thickly  inhabited,  compared  with  almost  any  other 
part  of  Brazil.  Big  cngcnhos,  or  sugar  mills,  often  punctuated  the 
landscape  with  tall,  smoke-belching  stacks ;  immense  fields  of  sugar 
cane  were  everywhere  being  harvested,  and  though  it  was  February, 
workmen  were  hoeing  with  big  clumsy  enxadas  cane-sprouts  in  the 
same  plots  in  which  mature  cane  was  being  cut.  Most  of  the  canes 
came  from  the  fields  tied  in  two  bundles  on  the  backs  of  horses,  to 
be  dumped  in  heaps  at  the  stations  and  then  carefully  corded  on 
the  railway  cars.  At  least  half  the  stations  had  a  long  train  of  red 
and  yellow  cane  loaded  or  loading  on  the  sidetrack,  and  our  way 
was  frequently  blocked  by  similar  trains  bound  for  Recife.  These 
and  the  many  large  cngcnhos,  the  little  private  railways  on  the  fasendas, 
with  their  screeching  English  or  Belgian  dwarf  locomotives,  and  the 
evidence  of  movement  and  industry  everywhere,  gave  one  the  feeling 
of  having  once  more  reached  a  land  of  ambition.  Pernambuco  is 
Brazil's  greatest  sugar-producing  state.  Thanks  to  this  fact  and  to 
an  unusually  honest  government,  it  enjoys  a  prosperity  second  only 
to  that  of  Sao  Paulo,  and  possibly  of  Rio  Grande  do  Sul,  in  the  entire 
republic.  Cotton  and  mandioca  also  .are  important  crops,  often, 
growing  together,  and  bales  of  the  former  lay  piled  up  at  many  sta- 
tions. Everything,  the  cane-fields,  the  sugar-mills,  the  large  old  plan- 
tation-houses in  choice  locations  and  guarded  by  half  a  dozen  majestic 
royal  palms,  even  the  swarms  of  beggars  at  the  stations — gave  the 
impression  of  an  old  and  long-established  community. 

It  was  a  constant  surprise  to  find  it  cooler  up  on  this  slight  plateau 
than  in  the  sugar-fields  of  Tucuman,  twenty-five  degrees  nearer  the 
South  Pole,  and  I  never  could  reconcile  myself  to  the  total  absence 
of  jungle.  Both  these  conditions  were  evidently  due  to  the  same 
cause, — the  constant  strong  trade  winds  that  sweep  across  all  this 
paunch  of  South  America  and  blow  the  rains,  without  which  jungle 
cannot  grow  even  on  the  equator,  farther  inland.  Water  was  so 
scarce  that  there  were  only  shallow  mudholes  for  the  rare  cattle, 
and  all  the  region  appeared  sorely  in  need  of  irrigation.  As  in  Egypt, 
the  dry  soil  or  the  glaring  sun  seemed  to  produce  blindness,  and  there 
were  many  sightless  wretches  among  the  beggars  that  swarmed  every 
station.  Indeed,  the  sugarcane,  the  cotton,  the  lack  of  moisture  in 
air  and  soil,  the  very  cngcnhos,  carried  the  mind  back  to  the  land  of 
the  Nile.  Mendicants  in  the  last  stages  of  every  loathsome  disease 
thrust  their  ailments,  their  frightful  faces,  their  leprous  finger-stumps 
upon  one  wherever  the  train  halted.     All  the  people  of  this  region, — 


EASTERNMOST   AMERICA  387 

beggars,  bootblacks,  or  politicians — have  the  habit  of  touching,  pat- 
ting, pawing  one  over  to  attract  attention,  and  it  was  only  by  constant 
vigilance  that  I  could  keep  myself  free  from  often  noisome  personal 
contacts.  Then,  in  that  liberty-is-license  South  American  way,  swarms 
of  ragged  urchins  and  shiftless  men  poured  into  the  cars  at  every 
station,  lingering  the  spout  of  the  empty  water-can,  squatting  in  the 
vacant  seats,  thrusting  their  attentions  upon  the  passengers,  stark  naked 
children,  with  navels  protruding  several  inches  from  their  rounded 
stomachs,  scampered  in  and  out  of  every  opening,  no  attempt  whatever 
being  made  by  trainmen  or  station  police  to  reduce  this  annoying 
anarchy.  Many  beggars  and  tramps  used  a  sugarcane  as  a  staff — per- 
haps as  a  sort  of  last  straw  against  starvation. 

I  do  not  believe  in  charity,  or  at  least  in  promiscuous  giving,  but 
the  Brazilian  does,  and  every  one  of  the  beggars  who  flock  about  the 
stations  throughout  northern  Brazil  seems  to  get  something  for  his 
trouble.  Some  of  them  were  frankly  Africans,  but  there  were  others 
whose  negro  blood  showed  only  in  their  love  of  sucking  a  sugar- 
cane, the  most  work  for  the  least  gain  of  any  labor  on  earth.  Even 
the  prosperous  cities  are  not  free  from  this  eleemosynary  multitude. 
When  the  archbishop  of  Pernambuco  returned  to  his  palace  after  the 
inauguration  of  the  "son  of  Sergipe,"  he  found  235  beggars  waiting 
at  his  door.  The  Brazilian  no  doubt  feels  that  to  give  alms  through 
an  institution  would  be  to  pay  most  of  it  into  the  capacious  pockets 
of  its  managers  or  sponsors,  whereas  if  he  gives  himself,  he  knows 
that  the  gift  actually  reaches  the  needy  person — if,  indeed,  he  is  needy. 
Also,  he  is  more  apt  than  not  to  be  superstitious  and  to  fancy  that 
if  he  does  not  give,  his  own  affairs  will  not  prosper;  most  of  all,  he 
is  constantly  at  his  old  pastime  of  "fazendo  fita" — showing  oif.  Hence 
impudent,  able-bodied  beggars  are  a  pest  to  society  and  to  the  travelers' 
peace  throughout  the  country,  particularly  in  the  blazing  north. 

A  brilliant  moon  waiting  at  the  edge  of  the  stage  to  do  its  turn  even 
before  that  of  the  unclouded  sun  was  finished,  gave  us  a  continuous 
performance,  with  the  lighting  never  dimmed.  As  we  neared  Recife 
there  was  less  cultivation,  and  beyond  Cabo  White  flat  sand  and 
miserable  huts  took  the  place  of  the  rolling,  fertile,  well-housed 
country — though  even  here  there  was  not  the  squalor  of  Bahia. 
A  desert  of  sand,  an  almost  unpeopled  wilderness  had  surrounded  us 
for  some  time  before  the  low  lights  of  Recife  began  to  spring  up 
across  the  level  moon-bathed  landscape,  and  the  sandy  and  swampy 


388  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

land  of  the  Brazilian  littoral  continued  until  our  train  rumbled  out 
ipon  the  ver}'  beach  of  the  moon-silvered  Atlantic. 

It  was  already  7  :40,  and  there  was  no  time  to  be  lost  if  I  was  to 
take  up  my  professional  duties  that  evening.  About  noon  we  had  met 
the  up-train  with  the  day's  newspapers  and  I  had  caught  up  with  the 
world  and  its  doings  again.  Pernambuco  has  the  best  journals  north 
of  Rio,  one  of  which  claims  to  be  the  oldest  in  Latin-America,  and  I 
had  been  delighted  to  find  in  several  of  the  most  important  dailies 
half-page  Kinetophone  advertisements,  and  in  all  of  them  articles  to 
the  effect  that  "Edison's  new  marvel"  had  opened  the  night  before  with 
all  three  sessions  crowded  to  capacity  by  delighted  audiences.  But 
newspaper  stories  and  facts  often  have  little  in  common.  I  sprang 
into  the  first  automobile  to  offer  its  services  and,  after  a  jouncing  over 
cobblestones  that  felt  like  being  tossed  in  a  blanket,  was  set  down 
at  the  "Hotel  Recife."  This  was  said  to  be  the  best  in  town — which 
v.-as  certainly  slanderous  language  toward  the  others.  Razor  and 
shower-bath  having  transformed  me  from  a  dust-bin  discard  to  the 
personification  of  Beau  Brummel  on  a  tropical  excursion,  I  raced 
away  to  the  "Theatro  Moderno."  There  I  was  agreeably  surprised. 
Ruben  met  me  with  the  fraternal  embrace  at  the  door  of  a  large  new 
theater,  perhaps  the  most  sumptuous  in  which  we  had  played  in 
Brazil;  the  receipts  the  night  before  had  been  the  best  in  weeks,  and 
crowds  were  even  then  clamoring  for  admission.  The  sugar-prosperity 
of  Pernambuco,  abetted  rather  than  injured  by  the  World  War,  com- 
bined with  plentiful  advertising  in  newspaper  displays  and  articles, 
in  posters  and  handbills,  and  by  the  gyrations  through  the  streets  of 
two  honecos,  or  dolls,  ten  feet  high,  had  done  the  trick.  The  fact  that 
the  honecos  represented  a  friar  and  a  dancing-girl  respectively,  and 
that  their  public  promenading  was  accompanied  by  antics  which  a  more 
circumspect  people  would  have  considered  highly  indecent,  seemed 
to  have  been  an  advantage  rather  than  otherwise  in  Pernambuco. 

"Tut"  had  found  the  hotels  so  uninviting  that  he  was  sleeping  in 
his  hammock  on  the  stage  of  the  theater.  Our  first  move,  therefore, 
was  to  investigate  what  all  foreign  residents  assured  us  was  the 
best  stopping-place  in  Recife, — a  pcnsdo  kept  by  a  European  woman 
known  as  the  "Baroness."  It  was  out  in  the  suburb  of  Magdalena, 
twenty  minutes  by  electric  tramway  from  the  center  of  town — except 
that  passengers  lost  more  time  than  that  in  walking  across  a  condemned 
bridge  which  would  not  carry  the  cars.  The  pension  consisted  of  sev- 
eral buildings,  one  large  and  pretentious,  the  rest  simple  and  of  one 


EASTERNMOST    AMERICA  389 

story,  scattered  about  a  big  enclosed  yard  shaded  by  many  magnifi- 
cent tropical  trees  and  looking  out  behind  on  one  of  the  many  arms 
of  the  sea  which  divide  Recife  into  separate  sections.  We  took  a 
large  room  together,  opening  directly  on  the  garden,  with  a  mammoth 
tree  over  our  ver}^  door.  There  were  some  drawbacks — no  electric 
lights,  for  instance,  that  improvement  not  yet  having  reached  Per- 
nambuco  in  public  form,  though  a  few  places  had  a  private  plant.  Also 
the  "garden"  was  deep  in  sand,  for  lawns  are  unknown  in  this  part  of 
the  world.  But  a  high  fence,  as  well  as  dogs  and  servants,  made  it 
possible  to  leave  our  doors  wide  open  night  and  day  to  the  ever-cooling 
trade  wind,  and  there  was  a  quiet  homelikeness  as  well  as  cleanliness 
about  the  place  that  made  us  feel  as  if  we  had  suddenly  left  dirty, 
noisy,  quarrelsome  Brazil  behind. 

The  "Baroness"  had  the  advantage  of  good  servants  from  German 
steamers  interned  in  Pernambuco,  the  nearest  port  of  refuge  for 
many  of  those  in  the  South  Atlantic  when  the  war  broke  out.  In 
fact,  all  Pernambuco  was  fortunate  in  having  about  five  hundred 
men  of  similar  antecedents  to  serve  it  that  winter.  The  excellent 
band  of  the  Cap  Vilano,  for  instance,  made  not  only  the  most  energetic 
but  the  best  music  in  North  Brazil  at  the  "Cafe  Chic,"  just  around 
the  corner  from  our  theater — at  the  equivalent  of  a  dollar  a  night  to 
each  of  the  musicians.  The  war  had  brought  Recife  other  things.  Its 
sugar  and  cotton  having  kept  it  from  succumbing  to  the  "brutal 
crisis"  that  flagellated  the  rest  of  Brazil,  it  had  the  reputation  of 
being  the  best-to-do  city  in  the  country.  Consequently,  adventuresses 
of  all  nationalities  had  come  up  in  droves  from  dead  Rio  and  impov- 
erished Sao  Paulo,  and  Recife  had  more  high  class  members  of  the 
profession  that  needs  no  training  than  most  cities  of  five  times  its 
population. 

Though  we  often  hear  of  it,  there  is  really  no  city  of  Pernambuco. 
What  wc  call  by  that  name  is  properly  designated  by  one  almost  un- 
known to  foreigners.  Pernambuco  is  an  old  Indian  word  that  is 
only  correctly  appHed  to  the  entire  state,  but  it  has  long  been  the 
custom  not  only  of  seafaring  men  and  all  foreigners,  but  of  the  Bra- 
zilians themselves  not  resident  within  the  state,  to  call  its  capital 
Pernambuco.  Its  real  name  is  Recife,  and  the  story  of  its  founding 
is  not  without  interest.  In  1531  Pedro  Lopez  Pereira  established  on 
the  only  hill  in  this  vicinity  a  town  which  was  called  Olinda,  and 
which  in  time  became  a  very  aristocratic  center.  But  though  it  had 
a  beautiful  site  on  the  open  ocean,  Olinda  had  no  port,  and  boats 


390  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

could  only  land  behind  the  recife,  or  reef,  some  miles  farther  south 
On  Christmas  day  of  1598  Jeronymo  de  Albuquerque  formally  gave  the 
name  Recife  to  the  cluster  of  trading  posts  that  had  grown  up  there,  and 
built  the  fortress  by  which  the  city  is  still,  at  least  in  theory,  defended. 
The  settlers  at  the  "Reef"  were  almost  entirely  Portuguese  merchants, 
whom  the  aristocrats  of  the  proud  residential  town  of  Olinda 
called  "mascates" — peddlers  or  hawkers.  The  rivalry  and  ill-feeling  be- 
tween the  two  towns  grew  apace.  The  colonial  nobility  of  Olinda, 
resenting  any  interference  from  their  lowborn  neighbors,  wished  to 
form  an  independent  republic  on  the  style  of  Venice,  and  the  quarrel 
finally  developed  into  what  is  known  in  Brazilian  history  as  the 
"War  of  the  Mascates."  Naturally  the  "peddlers,"  havin^^  nearly  all 
the  material  advantages,  had  the  best  of  it;  new  authorities  arriving 
from  Portugal  ended  the  struggle,  and  Recife  became  the  city,  port, 
and  capital  of  the  region,  leaving  Olinda,  small  and  isolated  on  its 
hill,  still  proud  of  its  aristocratic  origin,  but  a  mere  suburb  of  the 
modern  city. 

Unlike  Bahia,  Recife  had  no  ridge  to  build  on;  hence  it  is  deadly 
flat,  with  only  Olinda  five  miles  to  the  northwest  rising  above  the 
featureless  landscape,  though  far  behind  the  city  one  may  make  out 
the  v/ooded  hills  that  merge  gradually  into  the  flat-topped  chapadas 
of  the  sertdo  of  the  interior.  It  stands  on  the  sandy  beach  of  a  lagoon 
delta  where  two  rivers,  neither  of  them  of  much  importance,  meet,  and 
the  compact  old  town,  with  the  wharves,  banks,  and  most  of  the  busi- 
ness houses,  is  really  on  an  island,  protected  now  not  only  by  the 
natural  reef,  but  by  a  long  breakwater  behind  which  ships  anchor. 
There  is  no  bay ;  hence  steamers  which  do  not  enter  the  inner  port 
must  in  rough  weather  land  their  passengers  in  a  "chair"  running  on 
a  cable  from  the  breakwater.  Many  a  traveler  to  South  America 
remembers  nothing  of   Pernambuco  except  that  hair-raising  landing. 

As  Bahia  is  a  city  of  hills  and  wooded  ridges,  so  Pernambuco  is 
one  of  waterways  and  bridges.  The  so-called  River  Capibaribe  runs, 
cr  at  least  ebbs  and  flows,  through  town,  and  there  are  a  score  of 
natural  canals,  estuaries,  and  mud  sloughs  filling  and  emptying  with 
each  tide,  while  hundreds  of  dwellers  in  thatched  huts  of  the  suburbs 
have  the  advantages  of  Venice  in  so  far  as  a  chance  to  pole  themselves 
about  on  their  rude  rafts  goes.  Marshy  salt  water  comes  in  and  around 
the  city  at  every  tide,  and  the  rivers,  coves,  or  quagmires  to  be 
crossed  in  a  journey  through  it  are  numerous — doubly  so  since  several 
«>f  its  many  bridges  have  been  condemned  for  vehicular  traffic.    Palm 


EASTERNMOST   AMERICA  39^ 

trees,  chiefly  of  the  cocoanut  family,  grow  everywhere,  and  between 
its  waterways  the  city  of  bridges  is  noted  for  its  dry  and  sandy  soil; 
hence  one  can  scarcely  stray  from  the  paved  streets  without  wading 
either  in  water,  mud,  or  sand. 

Properly  speaking,  Recife  is  the  older  section  of  the  town,  out 
near  the  reef,  and  given  over  mainly  to  business.  The  modern  city 
covers  several  times  more  territory  than  that,  including  country-like 
outskirts  of  such  suggestive  names  as  Capunga,  Afflictos,  and  Ser- 
taozinho  among  its  suburbs.  There  is  Afogados  (Drowned  Man) 
out  past  the  Five  Points  station  on  the  beach,  a  big  suburb  of  mud  and 
thatched  huts  among  swamp  bushes  and  a  network  of  tidewater,  with 
lanes  of  mud  that  snap  like  the  cracking  of  a  Sicilian  whip  when 
the  tide  is  out  and  the  tropical  sun  blazing  down  upon  them.  In 
other  directions,  still  within  the  city  limits,  are  miles  of  old  estates 
and  aged  plantation-houses  living  out  their  dotage  under  magnificent 
royal  palms.  To  get  about  this  broken  up  city  there  were  big  new 
English  and  American  street-cars,  so  new  that  passengers  were  not  yet 
permitted  to  put  their  feet  on  the  seats.  It  was  less  than  a  year 
since  the  old  mule-cars  for  which  Pernambuco  was  long  famous, 
had  been  superseded — in  the  outskirt  of  Torre  they  might  still  be 
seen — and  ragamuffins  who  had  never  heard  the  word  "bond"  in 
its  ordinary  significance  made  frequent  use  of  it  in  its  P)razilian  sense. 
The  new  company  was  pushing  its  lines  in  every  direction  and  already 
the  tramway  was  advertising  itself  as  ready  to  furnish  electric-light 
to  business  houses  along  its  lines.  Thus,  though  one  had  the  sense  of 
treading  on  the  heels  of  modernity  in  Pernambuco,  in  all  northern 
Brazil,  the  pre-invention  age  always  succeeded  in  eluding  one  andl 
escaping  just  over  the  edge  of  the  horizon. 

Besides  its  brand  new  electric  street-car  system  and  the  three 
lines  of  the  "Great  Western"  leaving  it  in  as  many  directions,  Recife 
has  five  amusing  little  railroads,  "toy  locomotives  hitched  to  a  string 
of  baby-carriages,"  as  "Tut"  called  them,  which  do  a  volume  of  noisy, 
dirty,  dusty  business  to  the  north  and  northeast  of  the  city.  For 
many  years  these  ancient  contrivances  of  an  English  company  were 
the  only  urban  traffic  in  and  about  Recife,  One  crowds  into  a  tene- 
ment-house of  a  station,  wages  pitched  battle  about  a  knee-high  hole 
in  the  wall  to  buy  a  ticket,  enters  an  ancient  closed  wooden  box  on 
wheels  suggestive  of  what  trains  must  have  been  in  the  days  of 
Charlemagne,  amalgamates  with  variegated  Brazilians  on  a  hard,  mis- 
shapen wooden  seat,  and  waits.    When  one  has  waited  long  enough  to 


392  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

run  down  to  "B.A."  and  back,  there  come  ten  or  twelve  ear-splitting 
screeches  and  back-breaking  jolts,  and  the  train  is  off  for  some  other 
"station"  fifty  yards  away,  with  a  deluge  of  smoke,  soot,  and  cinders 
which  penetrate  to  the  utmost  recesses  of  one's  person.  For  a  long 
hour  the  contrivance  screams  its  sooty  way  through  endless  dusty 
streets  in  which  the  irreconcilable  tropical  sunlight  of  February  strikes 
one  full  in  the  face  like  the  fist  of  an  enemy,  and  at  the  end  of  that 
time  the  weary  traveler  may  descend  five  or  even  six,  miles  away,  at 
Olinda,  or  at  some  of  the  plantation-town  suburbs  shaded  by  many 
trees,  yet  dreary  with  their  sand  in  place  of  grass.  There  are  two 
such  lines  to  Olinda,  out  past  Santo  Amaro  with  its  British  cemetery 
and  across  a  broad  swamp  by  a  causeway ;  but  the  company  claims  that 
the  concession  is  no  longer  worth  the  holding  since  the  coming  of 
electric  competition.  No  doubt  Pernambiicanos  considered  these  me- 
dieval trains  a  wonderful  innovation  and  convenience  when  they  first 
appeared,  but  it  is  more  pleasant  now  to  depend  on  electricity — or 
to  walk. 

I  waded  for  miles  barefoot  along  the  beach  to  Olinda  one  day. 
Palm-trees  edged  the  curve  of  the  shore  with  their  inimitable  plumage, 
streaking  the  staring  white  sunlight  with  slender  shadows.  Thatched 
huts  along  the  beach,  with  all  the  Atlantic  and  its  breezes  spread  out 
before  them,  suggested  where  many  a  well-to-do  family  of  Recife 
spends  its  summers.  An  old  wreck  here  and  there  protruded  from  the 
surface  of  the  sea,  relics  of  some  collision  with  the  easternmost 
point  of  the  New  World.  Olinda  piled  high  on  its  hill  amid  palm-trees 
and  many  huge  old  churches,  takes  on  the  air  of  both,  of  age  and 
reverence  and  the  regal  dignity  of  the  royal  palm.  Its  many  old 
buildings  are  clustered  rather  closely  together ;  it  seems  still  to  scorn 
business  as  thoroughly  as  in  the  olden  days,  and  to  spend  most  of  its 
time  gazing  across  the  swampy  flatlands  at  its  materialistic  rival,  or 
out  upon  the  blue  sea  which  is  so  rarely  seen  from  Recife. 

The  city  we  call  Pernambuco  claims  200,000  inhabitants,  and  of 
these  perhaps  one  in  three  could  pass  as  white.  Even  in  the  huts 
lining  the  water  or  mud  labyrinths  of  the  outskirts  whites  are  numer- 
ous, though  often  as  trashy  as  the  negroes.  It  is  surprising  that  as 
one  nears  the  equator  in  Brazil  the  proportion  of  Caucasian  blood 
increases,  but  it  is  easily  explained.  All  that  part  of  South  America 
which  thrusts  itself  halfway  across  the  sea  to  Africa  had  many 
slaves,  but  Bahia  not  only  grew  a  crop  which  required  more  labor, 
but,  its  port  being  then  the  national  capital,  it  had  the  advantage  of 


EASTERNMOST    AMERICA  393 

fame,  as  well  as  its  great  bay  as  a  safe  landing-place.  The  result 
is  that  while  Bahia  is  a  negro  town,  Pernambuco  is  a  city  of  mulattoes, 
with  a  mixture  of  tyj)cs  that  can  only  be  differentiated  by  the  rich 
color-terminology  of  Brazil.  On  the  whole,  the  Recifense  is  a  more 
pleasant  individual  than  the  blacker,  more  slovenly,  more  impudent 
Baltiano.  Like  most  of  the  people  of  North  Brazil,  he  talks  in  a  kind 
of  singsong,  ending  almost  every  sentence  with  nao  (no)  or  ouviouf 
(did  you  hear?).  There  are  few  really  masculine  voices  in  Brazil, 
and  the  persistent  cackle  of  poor,  cracked  trebles,  chattering  constantly 
at  high  speed  about  nothing,  eventually  gets  on  the  nerves,  unless 
one  has  been  spared  that  troublesome  equipment.  The  chief  business 
of  the  city  is  still  that  of  the  "mascates,"  in  a  larger  sense, — the  ex- 
porting of  sugar  and  cotton  and  the  importing  of  things  needed 
by  the  growers  of  sugar  and  cotton,  with  the  usual  large  proportion 
of  the  benefits  slicking  to  the  fingers  of  the  fortunately  placed  middle- 
men. Carrcgadorcs  dc  assucar,  or  sugar  porters,  wearing  a  sort  of 
football  head-mask  over  their  hats,  are  among  the  most  familiar 
sights  of  the  old  city,  and  the  pungent  odor  of  crude  sugar  strikes  one 
in  the  face  everywhere  in  the  wharf  and  warehouse  section.  The 
sugar  comes  from  the  cngenhos  in  crude,  dark-brown  form ;  the  tropi- 
cal heat  causes  it  to  ooze  out  until  not  only  the  bags  but  the  half-naked 
negroes  who  handle  them  are  dripping  and  smeared  with  molasses 
from  top  to  bottom.  When  the  rotting  bag  bursts  entirely  the  contents 
is  spread  out  in  the  sun  and  barefoot  negroes  are  sent  to  wade 
ankle-deep  back  and  forth  in  it,  until  it  is  dry  enough  to  be  shoveled 
up  again. 

There  are  not  so  many  churches  per  capita  in  Recife  as  in  Bahia, 
but  they  are  by  no  means  scarce,  while  the  schools  are  if  anything 
worse, — miserable  little  one-den  huts  hanging  on  the  edges  of  mud- 
holes  or  salt-water  marshes,  according  to  the  state  of  the  tide.  The 
president  of  Pernambuco  asserted  in  his  annual  message  that  the  state 
schools  could  not  afford  to  import  from  the  United  States  the  school 
furniture  needed,  because  of  the  high  tax  imposed  upon  it  by  th: 
federal  government!  Of  higher  institutions,  of  course,  there  is 
no  such  scarcity  as  in  the  elemental  grades.  The  Gymnasio  Pernam- 
bucano,  or  High  School  of  Pernambuco,  where  are  promulgated  the 
bachelor  degrees  that  make  men  "doctors,"  and  not  much  else,  is  a 
large  conspicuous  building  next  that  of  the  state  congress — and  it 
had  69  pupils.  Of  the  Faculdade  de  Darcito,  or  Law  School,  similar 
remarks  may  be  made.    In  the  old  business  section  of  Recife  especially 


394  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

the  condition  of  streets  and  buildings  left  much  to  be  desired,  but  under 
the  energetic  and  honest  new  president  promising  progress  was  already 
beginning  to  be  made. 

On  Saturday  night  our  share  of  the  receipts  had  been  more  than 
a  conto  and  toward  midnight  on  Sunday  I  carried  home  a  roll  of 
ragged  Brazilian  bills  large  enough  to  choke  a  rain-pipe.  I  was  some- 
what surprised,  therefore,  that  the  "bust-up"  came  as  early  as  the 
following  Wednesday.  I  knew  it  would  come  sooner  or  later,  but  I 
had  expected  to  be  able  to  stave  it  off  a  week  or  more  longer.  When 
"Colonel"  Ruben  turned  up  that  night,  we  had  already  been  reduced 
to  "reheated  soup."  This,  coupled  with  the  fact  that  he  had  loudly  and 
widely  advertised  "Six  Days  Only!"  and  had  now  decided  to  stay 
five  more,  had  greatly  reduced  our  audiences.  Ruben  took  one  look 
at  the  house  during  the  first  section,  suddenly  decided  that  he  had 
received  a  cable  from  his  wife  requiring  his  immediate  return  to 
Bahia,  and  disappeared  in  that  direction  so  swiftly  that  I  have  never 
seen  him  since.  Up  to  the  last  he  had  insisted  daily,  if  not  hourly,  that 
I  must  return  when  my  contract  with  Linton  expired  and  become 
manager  of  his  theater-to-be.  He  departed  owing  me  a  paltry  83$  as 
our  share  of  that  evening's  receipts,  but  he  left  on  my  hands  not  only  the 
"Theatro  Moderno"  until  the  following  Sunday  at  a  rental  of  300$ 
daily,  two  dusky  young  gentlemen  whom  he  had  brought  with  him 
from  Bahia  as  his  assistants,  and  the  unpaid  bills  for  several  half-page 
advertisements  in  the  local  papers,  but  so  many  other  creditors  that  he 
saw  fit  to  embark  at  daylight  from  an  unusual  place. 

Still,  this  was  little  compared  with  what  he  might  have  done,  and 
probably  we  had  made  more  money  with  his  experienced  assistance 
than  we  should  have  made  alone.  I,  too,  might  have  run  away,  had 
I  cared  to  leave  Americans  in  general  and  Edison  in  particular  in 
such  repute  as  Ruben  enjoys  to  this  day  in  Pernambuco.  Instead, 
I  spent  a  breathless  Thursday  preparing  to  meet  the  new  conditions 
that  had  been  forced  upon  us.  We  were  certain  to  lose  money  that 
night  and  the  next,  but  by  special  advertising  and  improved  programs 
I  hoped  to  make  it  up  on  Saturday  and  Sunday.  We  still  had  the 
two  calungos,  or  ten-foot  monk  and  dancing-girl  figures  on  men's 
legs,  for  though  one  of  Ruben's  creditors  had  attached  these,  he 
allowed  us  to  use  them  until  our  departure.  I  sent  them  out  with 
drums  and  handbills,  not  only  through  th.e  town,  but  to  all  its 
suburbs  and  outskirts,  including  even  aristocratic  Olinda.  In  short, 
for  the  first  time  I  was  a  full-fledged  theatrical  manager,  renting,  ad- 


EASTERNMOST    AMERICA  39a 

vertising,  managing,  auditing,  running  the  whole  show — even  me- 
chanically,  too,  for  that  night  "Tut"  got  a  touch  of  some  tropical  ill 
and  had  to  be  sent  home — and,  unfortunately,  paying  the  bills.  For 
in  spite  of  all  our  efforts  Saturday  night  left  us  with  the  balance 
slightly  on  the  side  of  expenditures.  I  had  already  begun,  however, 
to  prepare  tl.e  territory  ahead.  J.  A.  Mnhaes,  Junior,  a  Carioca 
engaged  in  the  film-furnishing  business  in  North  Brazil,  had  offered 
to  take  over  Ruben's  contract  and  extend  it  to  the  Amazon.  He  was 
an  unusually  honest-looking,  energetic  young  man,  good  company  and 
experienced,  as  well  as  widely  known  in  "movie"  circles,  and  before 
the  week  was  ended  he  had  sailed  away  toward  Para,  and  possibly 
Manaos,  as  our  self-paid  advance  agent. 

My  troubles  apparently  ended,  "Tut"  and  I  were  sitting  at  "break- 
fast" Sunday  morning  in  proper  best-boarding-house-in-town  style 
when  the  waiter  suddenly  handed  me  several  letters  from  Linton, 
bearing  nsither  stamps  nor  signs  of  post-office  handling.  They  had 
been  written  on  board  ship  on  the  way  north  from  Buenos  Aires, 
and  announced  that,  the  Kinetophone  having  ended  its  labors  in  the 
Argentine,  Linton  was  on  his  way  home,  as  soon  as  he  could  find  a 
wife  he  had  left  in  Rio,  with  the  two  Spanish-speaking  outfits.  With 
the  letters  he  forwarded  some  new  posters  and  Turco  Morandi,  former- 
ly manager  of  one  of  the  largest  theaters  in  "B.A.,"  lately  advance  agent 
for  the  Argentine  Kinetophone,  and  noted  for  his  double-width,  steel- 
riveted  honesty.  It  was  he  who  had  brought  the  letters  to  Pernambuco. 
and  about  noon  he  appeared  in  person,  dressed  in  the  latest  Jockey  Club 
style,  and  announced  himself  as  the  new  manager  of  the  Kinetophone 
in  Brazil. 

There  was  nothing  niggardly  about  Linton,  My  six  months  being 
up,  he  offered  to  let  me  turn  over  the  job  at  once,  take  the  first  boat 
either  to  Manaos  or  to  ih.e  United  States  at  his  expense,  draw  my 
salary  up  to  the  time  the  show  started  south  again,  collect  traveling 
expenses  from  Manaos  back  to  the  mouth  of  the  Amazon,  and  promised 
to  pay  me  later  whatever  might  be  dua  on  my  commission  basis.  "Tut" 
was  to  get  a  percentage  of  the  receijits  for  takin;^  charge  of  the  show, 
and  to  make  such  use  of  Morandi,  to  whom  Linton  had  already  ad- 
vanced a  considerable  sum,  as  he  saw  fit.  \Vhen  they  ran  out  of 
audiences  in  the  North,  the  three  were  to  take  the  show  back  down 
the  coast,  playing  in  the  smaller  towns  until  Linton  himself  returned 
to  pick  them  up. 

Had  there  been  any  evidence  that  my  labors  had  been  unsatisfactory, 


396  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

1  should  have  vanished  forthwith.  But  the  letters  expressed  satisfac- 
tion, and  Linton  was  not  a  man  to  indulge  in  flattery.  Moreover,  I 
wished  to  see  the  rest  of  Brazil,  and  I  did  not  want  to  see  it  as  a 
foot-loose  tourist.  I  much  preferred  to  go  on  to  Manaos  as  manager 
of  the  Kinetophone,  with  all  the  prestige  thereunto  appertaining,  to 
be  forced  to  mix  with  all  kinds  cf  people,  to  be  mistaken  now  and 
then  for  Edison  himself.  Besides,  I  could  not  take  advantage  of 
Linton's  extraordinary  generosity.  Instead  of  needing  another  man 
we  could  easily  have  gotten  along  with  one  less,  for  "Tut," 
who  was  some  little  inventor  himself,  had  improved  upon  Edi- 
son by  wiring  the  phonograph  in  such  a  way  that  it  could  be  touched 
off  from  the  booth,  and  any  fool  could  be  taught  in  a  few  minutes 
to  put  on  and  take  off  the  records.  Then  there  was  Vinhaes,  already 
on  his  way.  If  Morandi  had  arrived  a  few  days  earlier,  I  might  have 
sent  him  on  ahead  instead,  or  left  him  with  the  show  and  played  ad- 
vance agent  myself.  Worst  of  all,  however,  Linton,  as  almost  any 
American  would  have  done  under  the  circumstances,  had  chosen  the 
worst  possible  man  to  send  to  Brazil.  Morandi  not  only  spoke  Span- 
ish, but  was  an  argentino,  and  if  there  is  one  thing  Brazilians  resent 
more  than  being  spoken  to  in  Castilian  it  is  to  hear  it  spoken  with 
the  accent  of  their  greatest  national  rivals.  In  the  end  I  coaxed  the 
fashionable  newcomer  to  go  away  somewhere  and  lose  himself,  while  I 
spent  what  I  had  looked  forward  to  as  a  pleasant  Sunday  afternoon 
wondering  who  I  could  get  to  drown  him. 

For  the  first  time  in  Brazil  I  had  to  cut  out  the  Sunday  matinee  and 
announced  an  evening  performance  given  over  entirely  to  the  Kineto- 
phone— six  numbers  in  each  section,  with  a  ten-minute  interval  in 
which  to  change  audiences.  This  meant  double  labor  for  "Tut"  and 
Carlos,  but  it  would  save  us  50$  for  the  rent  of  ordinary  films,  10$ 
for  a  native  operator,  and  should  prove  a  great  drawing  card.  It  did. 
Unfortunately  I  had  set  the  opening  at  the  early  hour  of  six,  and 
the  coming  of  Morandi  caused  both  "Tut"  and  me  to  forget  the 
change.  Accustomed  to  arrive  at  the  theater  at  6:30  and  have  half  an 
hour  of  ordinary  films  before  our  turn  came,  we  sauntered  down  town 
as  usual,  and,  as  we  stepped  off  the  street-car,  what  should  greet  our 
astonished  ears  but  the  notes  of  one  of  our  numbers  known  as  the 
"Musical  Blacksmiths."  It  was  like  hearing  one's  own  voice  issuing 
from  the  lips  of  a  stranger.  Never  in  all  Brazil  had  a  Kinetophone 
number  been  given  without  either  "Tut"  or  myself  in  attendance.  We 
dashed  into  the  theater — and  found  Carlos  calmly  running  the  show! 


EASTERNMOST  AMERICA  397 

The  audience  had  taken  to  stamping  and  giving  other  evidences  of 
impatience,  and  the  plucky  Paulista,  having  taught  a  native  how  to 
put  on  the  records,  had  started  the  performance.  I  raised  his  scdary 
forthwith. 

In  our  three  sections  that  night  we  took  in  considerably  more  than 
a  million,  recouping  all  our  losses,  and  it  was  a  double  pleasure  not 
to  have  to  split  the  receipts  with  Ruben.  But  there  was  that  dashed 
argentino  to  spoil  the  effect  of  our  clTorts.  Luckily,  he  was  already 
complaining  of  the  "insupportable"  heat  and  complete  loss  of  appetite, 
while  kind,  if  unknown,  friends  had  filled  him  full  of  tales  of  yellow 
fever  and  the  plague,  so  that  he  had  come  to  me  almost  with  tears 
in  his  eyes  and  called  my  attention  to  the  wife  and  five  children  he 
had  left  in  Cuenos  Aires.  It  tock  us  the  better  part  of  Alonday  and 
Tuesday,  and  cost  nearly  half  a  million  reis  to  pay  his  debts,  release 
him  from  the  slimy  tentacles  of  the  customhouse,  and  set  him  on  his 
way  with  a  ticket  to  Rio,  but  the  relief  was  worth  the  exertion. 

By  this  time  we  had  moved  over  to  the  "Polytheama,"  an  open-air 
theater  in  which  I  had  arranged  to  play  three  nights  at  popular  prices. 
I  took  advantage  of  this  breathing- spell  to  run  out  into  tlie  interior  of 
the  state,  not  to  the  end  of  the  line,  for  that  would  have  meant  two 
days  absence  and  missing  a  performance,  but  as  far  as  Bezerros, 
where  the  daily  train  meets  itself  coming  back.  The  branch  runs  due 
w^est  from  Recife,  and  by  starting  at  seven  and  getting  back  at  five, 
with  constant  traveling,  I  covered   72  miles  and  return! 

Jaboatao  on  its  knoll  was  buzzing  with  energy  where  the  shops  of 
the  combined  railways  had  concentrated.  Hills  shrouded  in  blue 
veils  began  to  appear  as  soon  as  we  had  crossed  the  sandy  coast  strip. 
Farther  inland  it  grew  rolling,  everywhere  dreary,  dry,  and  bushy, 
with  many  tunnels  and  long  iron  viaducts.  Cotton  was  growing  here 
and  there  in  the  arid  soil,  but  it  was  scant  and  small,  with  one  bush 
where  in  cur  southern  states  there  would  have  been  eight  or  ten. 
This  region  of  rare  reed-and-mud  huts  bore  slight  resemblance  to 
that  along  the  line  from  Maceio  northward,  with  its  endless  trains  of 
cane,  its  crowded  population,  and  mammoth  old  fazenda  houses.  Negro 
blood  was  noticeably  less  as  we  left  the  coast,  for  slaves  were  imported 
chiefly  by  sugar-planters  and  were  not  needed,  nor,  indeed,  useful, 
in  the  grazing  regions.  There  were  said  to  be  many  cattle  in  the  state, 
but  they  must  have  been  farther  inland,  where  there  was  still  some- 
thing to  drink.  Passengers  had  to  carry  water  with  them,  for  neither 
trains  nor  stations  furnished  it.    Yet  only  two  years  before  this  region 


398  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

had  complained  of  heavy  rains !  Even  the  dining-car  service  of  the 
lines  to  the  north  and  south  of  Recife  was  lacking,  because  some 
petty  politician  of  the  interior  had  a  contract  with  the  government  to 
furnish  passengers  an  alleged  meal  at  one  of  the  stations,  and  the 
English  who  have  taken  the  line  over  are  compelled,  during  the  sixty 
years  of  their  lease,  to  stop  every  train  there  for  twenty  minutes. 

At  the  "Polytheama"  that  night  we  had  a  remarkably  good  audience, 
many  evidently  having  put  ofif  coming,  Brazilian  fashion,  until  the  last 
performance.  When  we  had  torn  down  the  show  and  packed  up, 
"Tut"  went  home  and  Carlos  to  wherever  he  slept,  and  after  a 
shower-bath  under  a  spigot,  I  swung  "Tut's"  hammock  between  two 
pillars  of  the  open-air  theater.  This  was  to  be  almost  my  first  actual 
traveling  with  the  show,  and  it  was  time  I  tried  out  what  my  com- 
panions had  been  enduring  for  months.  It  is  many  years  since  I  have 
waked  with  that  curious  sensation  of  wondering  where  I  am,  so  that 
I  had  no  difficulty  in  orienting  myself  when  there  came  a  beating  on 
the  cinema  door  at  daybreak.  One  of  the  carters  I  had  hired  to  take 
our  stuff  to  the  station  had  arrived  with  one  of  those  tiny,  ancient, 
two-wheeled  carts  of  North  Brazil  in  which  the  misplacing  of  a  bag 
of  flour  suspends  the  horse  in  the  air.  His  companion  did  not  turn 
up  until  an  hour  later,  after  the  other  had  dragged  all  the  trunks 
to  the  door,  and  it  was  perilously  near  train-time  when  I  at  last  sent 
them  hurrying  across  the  cobblestones  to  the  Brum  station  way 
over  in  old  Recife.  By  the  time  the  usual  hubbub  and  quarreling, 
grafting  and  exorbitant  charges,  coaxing  and  assisting  the  msufficient 
and  lazy  railway  employees  to  get  our  outfit  on  board  was  ended,  I 
was  congratulating  myself  on  my  foresight  in  having  arranged  for 
another  man  to  pay  our  traveling  expenses.  There  was  I2$500  duty 
to  pay  for  taking  our  trunks  out  of  the  state,  a  similar  amount  for 
importing  them  into  the  next  state  north,  express  charges  about 
equal  to  first-class  tickets  for  each  trunk,  and  while  the  fares  were 
not  high — five  dollars  for  nearly  three  hundred  miles — ^the  twenty 
per  cent,  surcharges  of  the  federal  and  state  governments  respectively 
on  the  tickets  made  the  final  total  a  considerable  sum. 


CHAPTER  XVII 


THIRSTY    NORTH    BRAZIL 


IT  WAS  four  in  the  afternoon  when  we  sighted  Parahyba,  capital 
of  the  state  of  the  same  name,  on  its  ridge  beside  a  river  of  similar 
designation  which  we  had  been  following  for  several  hours.  We 
were  met  by  a  considerable  delegation,  including  the  Danish  manager 
of  the  "Cinema  Rio  Branco,"  a  young  chap  whom  Vinhaes  had  left 
behind  to  look  after  his  interests,  and  the  German  owner  of  the 
"Pensao  Allema,"  whom  some  unauthorized  friend  from  Recife  had 
told  to  prepare  rooms  for  us.  As  the  only  other  hotel-keeper  in  town 
admitted,  evidently  under  the  impression  that  it  w-as  a  recommenda- 
tion, that  half  his  rooms  were  given  over  to  unprotected  women,  I 
allowed  our  personal  baggage  to  be  carried  away  by  the  solicitous 
German,  while  three  little  carts  dragged  the  rest  uphill  to  the  cinema. 
By  the  time  our  apparatus  was  set  up  and  the  tickets  stamped,  per- 
spiration was  oozing  from  our  shoes.  I  raced  back  to  the  peiisdo  to 
get  rid  of  two  days'  dust  and  whiskers,  and  by  the  time  I  appeared 
again  the  house  was  packed  to  the  roof.  But  as  it  held  only  four 
hundred,  and  the  president  of  the  state  had  thrust  himself  in  with 
half  a  dozen  generously  painted  females,  and  a  score  of  other  "influ- 
ential citizens"  had  followed  his  example,  it  was  evident  that  we  were 
not  going  to  win  an  independent  fortune  in  Parahyba.  To  make 
things  worse,  "Tut"  had  failed  to  try  out  the  apparatus  before  the 
doors  were  opened,  and  our  first  number  flashed  on  the  screen  with- 
out a  sound  to  accompany  it!  The  phonograph  had  suffered  some 
slight  injury  during  the  rough  journey  and  refused  to  speak.  To  my 
astonishment  a  great  howl  of  satisfaction  went  up  from  the  audience, 
followed  by  a  constant  series  of  cat-calls  until  the  loose  screw  had 
been  found  and  the  trouble  remedied. 

It  was  not  merely,  as  I  first  suspected,  that  sense  of  being  greater 
than  the  inventor  whose  invention  fails  to  work  which  had  delighted 
these  lineal  descendants  of  African  tree-climbers,  but  the  pleasure 
of  what  might  be  called  the  anti-Kinetophonists  at  being  able  to  say, 
even  momentarily,  "I  told  you  so!"     Formation  of  petty  cliques  is 


40O  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONU 

one  of  the  chief  pastimes  in  these  dawdling  old  towns  off  the  track 
of  world  travel,  and  Parahyba  had  divided,  without  our  knowledge, 
for  and  against  us  almost  at  the  moment  we  descended  from  the  train. 
Those  who  sided  with  the  disgruntled  hotel-keeper  joined  the  friends 
of  the  rival  cinema  in  an  effort  to  boycott  us,  with  the  result  thati 
though  w^e  did  not  know  it  until  next  day,  by  the  time  the  show  had 
been  set  up  all  Parahyba  had  been  assured  that  both  the  Kinetophone 
and  this  "gringo"  Edison  were  humbugs  of  the  first  water,  and  that 
those  who  came  to  see  it  would  be  wasting  their  money.  The  instant 
destruction  of  this  theory  as  soon  as  the  phonograph  had  been  read- 
justed confounded  the  opposition,  but  the  atmosphere  of  ill-will,  and 
of  doubt,  always  engendered  among  the  volatile  Brazilians  by  the 
slightest  mishap  on  an  opening  night,  could  be  felt  as  long  as  we 
remained  in  the  town. 

Parahyba  was  founded  in  1585  by  Martin  Leitao — his  name,  by  the 
way,  means  suckling  pig — eighteen  miles  from  the  mouth  of  the 
river  of  the  same  name.  This  region  was  once  abundant  in  the  pau 
brazil  for  which  the  country  was  named,  but  to-day  its  principal 
product  is  cotton,  bales  of  which  were  exchanging  places  with  barrels 
of  Minneapolis  flour  in  the  freight-cars  behind  the  station.  Most 
of  the  town's  estimated  30,000  inhabitants  appeared  to  be  loafing  gov- 
ernment employees.  They  were  a  melancholy  lot,  on  the  whole,  to 
whom  life  was  evidently  as  joyless  as  to  the  Puritan,  crushed  under 
the  weight  of  existence  and  always  struggling  to  repress  the  desire 
to  live  gladly.  "These  tropical  people,"  said  a  Dane  who  had  lived 
long  among  them,  "have  none  of  the  joy  of  living,  none  of  the  chest- 
expansion  of  pleasure  at  confronting  life  which  is  common  to  northern 
peoples.  Such  enjoyment  as  they  have  is  made  up  almost  exclusively 
of  the  constant  stimulating  of  the  sexual  instinct.  They  have  no  feel- 
ing for  what  we  people  of  the  North  call  a  "home,"  and  never  really 
found  one.  They  have  a  wildly  romantic  idea  of  marriage,  which 
means  to  them  nothing  but  physical  gratification,  and,  their  sensual 
instincts  satisfied,  they  continue  to  live  together  merely  out  of  custom, 
following  the  line  of  least  resistance.  There  is  not  a  man  in  town, 
from  president  to  porter,  who  does  not  keep  at  least  one  other  woman 
besides  his  wife,  if  he  can  by  hook  or  crook  afford  it." 

"Whatever  the  economic  condition  of  the  colony,"  boasts  the  His* 
tory  of  Parahyba,  "it  never  failed  to  bequeath  plenty  of  churches  to 
posterity."  The  town  terminates  in  a  bulking  old  religious  edifice, 
and  is  generously  supplied  with  others  throughout   its  length.     Of 


THIRSTY   NORTH    BRAZIL  401 

breadth  it  has  little,  for  it  falls  quickly  away  on  either  side  of  its  ridge 
i.ito  cacao  groves  or  vast  reaches  of  bluish  swamp-like  bushes,  half 
covered  at  high  tide.  The  dead  hot  streets  of  noonday  were  like  those 
of  an  abandoned  city;  stepping  from  the  sunshine  into  the  shade  was 
like  dropping  an  enormous  weight  off  one's  head  and  shoulders.  Most 
of  the  thirty  thousand  live  in  mud  huts  with  palm-leaf  roofs  and  doors, 
the  earth  for  floor,  and  the  omnipresent  hammock  for  chair,  bed,  and 
favorite  occupation.  The  central  praca  has  a  hint  of  grass,  by  great 
effort  and  much  carrying  of  water,  and  glorious  royal  palms  stand 
I'.igh  above  it.  I'ut  beautiful  as  it  is,  the  royal  palm  does  not  take  high 
rank  as  a  shade  tree.  Elsewhere  the  streets,  like  Kiplin^fs  railroad, 
soon  run  out  to  sand-heaps.  An  hour's  swift  walk  from  the  new 
I)Ower-liouse  at  the  end  of  the  made-in-Germany  tram  line  brings  one, 
through  hot  sandy  jungle,  heavily  wooded  in  places,  to  the  open  sea, 
where  the  well-to-do  Parahyhanos  go  in  "summer"  by  a  little  railroad 
that  did  not  operate  in  this  wintry  season.  Small  steamers  can  reach 
Parahyba  at  high  tide,  though  few  ever  do  so.  Its  port  is  Cabedello 
at  the  mouth  of  the  river,  the  fortress  of  which,  like  most  of  Brazil 
north  of  Rio,  fell  several  times  into  tiie  hands  of  Holland,  the  name 
of  the  town  being  once  changed  by  Maurice  of  Nassau  to  "Margarida" 
in  honor  of  his  mother. 

It  is  only  130  miles  by  rail  from  Parahyba  to  Natal,  capital  of  the 
next  state  north,  but  it  takes  more  than  twenty-four  hours  to  cover 
them.  For  some  distance  the  route  is  the  same  as  that  back  to  Recife ; 
then  at  Entroncamento,  which  its  Portuguese  for  Junction,  another 
branch  starts  north,  striking  well  inland,  like  the  other  lines  of  the 
"G.W.B.R."  The  yellow-green  cajueiro,  rugged  as  an  olive-tree,  was 
often  the  only  vegetation  that  broke  the  dreary  sand  landscape.  Evi- 
dently the  constant  trade  winds  that  were  so  welcome  to  the  sun- 
scorched  skin  are  deadly  to  the  soil,  blowing  far  to  the  south  and 
west  the  rains  it  needs  so  badly.  White  men  living  in  northeastern 
Brazil  complain  that  eyes  grow  weak  early  in  life  from  the  constant 
glare.  Even  bread  dries  up  in  this  moistureless,  heated  air  almost 
between  the  cutting  and  the  raising  to  the  lips.  Here  and  there  were 
patches  of  cotton,  in  saffron-colored  blossom,  planted  in  small  quantity 
and  only  by  the  poorer  classes,  for  those  who  keep  account  of  profit 
and  loss  do  not  find  it  worth  the  trouble.  Yet  one  carried  away  the 
impression  that,  properly  irrigated  and  inhabited  by  an  energetic 
people,  this  thirsty  paunch  of  South  America  should  be  able  to  feed 
all  the  armies  of  Europe.    Grazing,  however,  is  the  main  industry  on 


402  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

the  larger  estates.  In  North  Brazil  the  word  fasenda  loses  the  s\g- 
nificance  of  "plantation"  that  it  has  to  the  south  and  means  cattle  ranch, 
of  which  there  are  great  numbers  farther  inland.  Such  plantations 
as  are  cultivated  are  usually  in  the  hands  of  a  morador,  literally  a 
''dweller,"  who  runs  the  place  to  suit  himself  and  sells  the  crop  to 
the  owner  at  a  fixed  price  agreed  upon  between  them.  There  are  few 
absentee  owners  in  this  settled  eastern  part  of  the  region,  however, 
even  the  "best  families"  spending  much  of  the  year  on  their  estates 
and  only  a  few  months  in  their  town  house  in  the  capital.  The  more- 
or-less  negro  laborers  are  paid  from  500  to  1000  reis  a  day,  with 
ground  on  Avhich  to  build  their  mud  and  palm-leaf  huts ;  but  it  is 
probably  as  much  as  they  earn,  and  there  is  no  approach  to  slavery 
or  peonage,  for  the  obsequiousness  of  the  working  class,  so  striking 
to  the  American  traveler  in  most  of  South  America,  has  no  exponents 
in  Brazil. 

A  moderate  range  of  hills  gradually  grew  up  on  our  left,  and  we 
rose  high  enough  above  the  general  dead-level  to  look  across  immense 
reaches  of  Brazil,  bushy  and  faintly  rolling,  flooded  with  sun  to  the 
ghost  of  the  far-off  range.  As  usual,  there  was  not  a  drop  of  water 
on  the  train,  which  would  not  have  been  so  bad  if  anything  to  drink 
had  been  sold  along  the  line.  But  there  were  not  even  oranges,  and 
dining-cars  do  not  run  above  Parahyba.  Well  on  in  the  afternoon 
we  halted  at  a  station  with  a  large  earthenware  crock  of  water,  luke- 
warm and  of  swampy  odor,  on  the  platform.  The  first  man  to  drink 
from  the  single  tin  can  hanging  beside  it  dropped  it  into  the  vessel, 
whereupon  the  next  travel-stained  mulatto  rolled  up  a  sleeve  and 
plunged  in  a  yellow  arm  to  the  elbow.  The  natives  saw  nothing  amiss 
in  this,  and  the  rest  of  us  were  forced  to  drink  anyway,  for  we  were 
on  the  verge  of  choking  to  death. 

Toward  sunset  we  drew  up,  in  a  bushy  half-desert,  at  the  town  of 
Guarabira,  recently  renamed  Independencia,  but  a  change  which  the 
populace  had  refused  to  adopt,  perhaps  because  they  found  the  new 
name  sarcastic.  Here  all  trains,  from  north  or  south,  stop  overnight, 
so  that  the  so-called  hotels,  lacking  more  of  the  indispensable  require- 
ments of  public  hostelries  than  the  stay-at-home  could  imagine  pos- 
sible, were  crowded  beyond  their  capacity,  though  on  four  nights  a 
week  they  are  empty.  There  was  a  good  cinema  in  Independencia, 
which  plays  only  on  the  three  train-nights  and  on  Sundays.  The  owner 
had  gone  down  to  Parahyba  to  see  the  Kinetophone  and  had  come 
back  with  me,  coaxing  me  all  the  way  to  give  him  a  two-day  contract. 


THIRSTY   NORTH   BRAZIL  403 

Instead,  I  signed  for  one  day  on  the  return  trip,  for  this  time  the 
show  was  to  sail  directly  from  Cabedello  to  Ceara,  picking  me  up  at 
Natal. 

By  six  next  morning  the  same  crowd  of  us,  all  men,  were  riding 
on  into  the  north  by  the  same  train.  Toward  eight  we  crossed  the 
arbitrary  boundary  into  Rio  Grande  do  Norte,  grinding  on  through 
unbroken  miles  of  the  same  bushy  wilderness.  Every  town  of  half  a 
dozen  huts  sent  its  quota  of  beggars  down  to  meet  the  train,  so  that 
the  begging  line  that  had  begun  at  Maceio  was  never  broken.  The 
"Great  Western  of  Brazil"  could  add  materially  to  its  revenue  by  a 
tax  on  station  mendicants.  Before  ten  we  stopped  at  a  partly  white- 
washed collection  of  desert  huts  for  jantar,  first  of  Brazil's  two  daily 
meals.  The  first-class  passengers  charged  madly  across  the  sand  to 
one  of  the  huts,  where  a  long  table  w^s  set  for  some  thirty  guests. 
Each  "washed"  his  hands  in  the  single  pan  of  yellow  water,  wiped 
them  on  the  one  towel,  and  fell  to  with  a  mighty  noise  upon  the  im- 
mense plates  of  fish,  roast  pork,  beef  in  all  its  forms,  rice,  farofa, 
and  chicken  which,  already  cold,  garnished  the  table.  To  wash  down 
this  stalwart  provender  there  was  nauseating  luke-warm  water,  or 
equally  tepid  and  unpalatable  beer,  at  prices  only  within  the  reach 
of  the  wealthy.  As  we  ate,  the  whistle  of  our  train  kept  blowing, 
as  if  the  contrivance  were  about  to  dash  away  again,  and  having  gulped 
down  the  dinner  ostrich  fashion,  we  rushed  back  on  board  and  gradu- 
ally crawled  on  into  the  north. 

Beyond,  we  rose  slightly,  and  there  opened  out  a  vista  of  flat  valley 
with  some  fertility.  Bananas  and  green  cocoanuts  were  offered  for 
sale  at  some  of  the  stations,  from  nearly  all  of  which  great  baskets 
of  mangos  were  shipped.  Here  the  chief  features  of  a  landscape 
uninspiring  as  a  decapitated  palm-tree  were  fields  of  mandioca,  their 
willow-like  bushes  from  one  to  ten  feet  high.  The  tuberous  root  of 
this  plant  is  peeled  and  the  poison  washed  or  squeezed  out,  after  which 
it  is  turned  into  one  of  the  several  flours  or  meals  that  stand  in  jars 
on  every  Brazilian  table.  If  it  is  simply  cooked,  fermented,  and  dried, 
the  result  is  farinha  sccca,  white,  bran-like  mandioca  flour;  a  more 
elaborate  process,  including  grating  under  water,  gives  the  yellow 
farinha  d'aqoa,  which  seems  to  be  the  favorite.  A  coarser  form  of 
the  same  product  is  cnlTed  farofa,  and  during  the  cooking  there  are 
precipitated  the  giun-like  grains  we  call  tapioca.  Taqmra,  a  species 
of  alcohol,  is  also  produced  from  mandioca.  Farinha  or  farofa  are  to 
the  Brazilians  what  potatoes  are  to  the  Irish.     Whole  boatfuls  of  it 


404  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

in  leaf-and-creeper  baskets  may  be  seen  loading  or  unloading  at  every 
coast  town,  and  the  native  who  could  not  reach  out  and  get  a  spoon- 
ful— or  a  handful — of  this,  his  favorite  fodder,  with  which  to  thicken 
his  soup  or  stew  or  to  eat  dry,  would  consider  his  dinner  a  total 
failure. 

The  wearisome  desert  country  broke  up  frankly  into  sand-dunes  as 
we  neared  the  coast  again,  and  through  these  and  a  bit  of  arid  vege- 
tation we  rumbled  into  Natal,  not  only  the  end  of  the  "Great  Western 
of  Brazil  Railway,"  but  the  jumping-off  place  of  those  traveling  north, 
for  here  South  America  turns  sharply  to  the  westward.  A  little  line, 
staggering  under  the  name  of  "Estrada  de  Ferro  Central  do  Rio 
Grande  do  Norte,"  does  start  from  across  the  harbor  and  wander  a  few 
hours  and  about  as  many  miles  out  into  the  country,  but  it  soon 
returns,  as  if  terrified  at  the  thought  of  losing  itself  in  the  choking 
wilderness.  There  would  be  no  choice  henceforth  but  to  take  to  the 
sea.  The  Brazilian  Government  has  long  contemplated  extending  its 
principal  line  from  Pirapora  on  the  Sao  Francisco  to  Para,  which 
would  make  it  the  "Central  Railway  of  Brazil"  indeed ;  but  even  had 
this  nebulous  project  already  been  carried  out,  I  should  not  have 
chosen  that  route,  for  while  scenery  is  all  very  well  in  its  way,  the 
great  bulk  of  Brazil's  estimated  thirty  millions  of  people  live  along 
her  seaboard. 

Raul  de  Freitas  Walker,  a  more  than  ordinarily  endurable  young 
Brazilian,  agent  for  the  "Companhia  Cinematographica  Brazileira" 
with  which  we  had  signed  our  first  contract,  agreed  to  share  with  me 
the  only  room  available  in  the  "International  Annex,"  another  of  the 
alleged  "hotels"  of  North  Brazil.  It  was  a  garret  room,  in  which 
Freitas  occupied  the  hammock  and  I  the  bed,  and  the  best  that  can  be 
said  of  it  is  that  it  had  first  choice  right  off  the  ocean  of  the  constant 
trade  winds  bound  inland  on  their  drought  provoking  errands.  Its 
scant  half-inch  partitions  made  the  pastimes  of  my  fellow-guests 
and  the  mulatto  girls,  who  accosted  one  everywhere  with  an  inviting 
air,  quite  free  from  privacy,  but  there  was  no  choice  between  enduring 
them  and  going  out  to  sleep  in  the  sand  on  the  beach.  The  maternal 
grandfather  of  Freitas  was  English ;  hence  his  silent  last  name,  which 
he  pronounced,  when  forced  to  do  so,  "Vahl-kar."  His  British  blood 
had  not  saved  him  from  being  a  true  Brazih"an,  and  on  the  second  day 
he  left  me  with  vociferous  regrets  and  moved  over  to  a  cheaper 
one-story  hotel,  not  to  save  money  but  "so  I  won't  have  to  climb  stairs." 
Natal  is  rather  a  pleasing  town,  for  all  its  aridity.     Considering  the 


THIRSTY   NORTH    BRAZIL  405 

difficulties  it  has  to  struggle  against  in  the  form  of  heat,  sand,  and  the 
usual  tropical  drawbacks,  it  is  almost  worthy  of  praise.  Though 
they  are  knee-deep  in  sand  wherever  they  are  not  paved,  its  streets 
are  wide,  and  there  are  several  large  public  gardens  marked  by  the 
indolent  swaying  of  flexible  palm-trees.  Government  buildings,  and 
a  few  private  ones,  are  far  from  being  eyesores.  If  the  electric-lights 
are  weak,  they  are  at  least  widespread,  and  electric  tramcars  carry 
one  in  any  direction,  notably  to  the  top  of  a  great  sand  ridge  called 
Petropolis,  from  which  there  is  a  far-reaching  view  of  curving  beach 
edged  with  leaning  cocoanut  palms,  of  the  reef  that  gave  Natal  its  site, 
and  the  old  fort  at  the  narrow  entrance  to  the  bottle-like  liit'.e  harbor. 
Perhaps  there  are  12,000  inhabitants,  if  one  counts  all  the  mud  huts 
scattered  about  the  sand-blown  outskirts — for  in  places  the  sand  is 
drifted  completely  over  the  rails  of  the  tram-line  that  stretches  on  over 
the  rolling  sandhills  to  nowhere. 

At  one  of  the  two  cinemas  our  poster  portrait  of  Edison  was  already 
displayed,  though  it  would  be  at  least  two  months  before  the  show- 
could  play  there.  Para  beer,  reminding  me  that  the  end  of  Brazil  was 
approaching,  was  sold  in  the  cafes  and  hotels,  but  it  seemed  to  enjoy 
less  popularity  than  a  mineral  water  from  Wisconsin,  widely  con- 
sumed by  Brazilians.  Local  drugstores  advertised  an  "Especifico 
contra  Can^aco"  (Specific  against  Tiredness)  which  should  have  won 
its  inventor  a  fortune  in  Brazil  alone.  Many  otherwise  pretty  girls — 
if  one  could  overlook  a  cocoa  tint — lost  their  rating  for  lack  of  good 
teeth.  Politicians  in  heavy  black  frock-suits,  waiting  in  the  broiling 
sun  for  others  of  their  clan,  made  it  a  pleasure  to  know  that  there  are 
some  places  where  politicians  must  do  penance  for  their  sins.  Social 
formality  refused  to  take  climate  into  account,  and  at  the  gate  of 
the  sandy  cemetery,  hot  as  the  most  approved  purgatory,  male  visitors 
were  requested  to  remove  their  hats!  Sharp-cut  masses  of  b'ack  shade 
alternating  with  patches  of  blinding  glare,  a  parrot  trying  to  pick  the 
red  spots  off  a  ten  of  diamonds  as  the  only  sign  of  life  in  a  long  noon- 
day street-vista,  contrasted  with  the  shrieking  far  into  the  night  of 
sidewalk  groups — for  Brazilians  of  the  north  cannot  discuss  the  sim- 
plest subjects  without  howling,  dancing,  and  waving  their  hands  in 
their  excitement — complete  the  picture  of  Natal. 

St.  Patrick's  Day  in  the  morning  dawned  hotter  than  I  had  ever 
known  it  before.  As  I  looked  out  across  sandhills  and  ocean  toward 
the  soft  summer  sunrise,  I  made  out  the  steamer  Para  of  the  "Lloyd- 
Brazileiro"  already  at  anchor  a  stone's-throw  from  the  shore.     It  was 


4o6  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

just  too  far  off  to  make  out  whether  "Tut"  and  the  show  were  on 
board,  and  after  waiting  in  vain  for  them  to  come  ashore  I  slipped 
into  my  oldest  garments  and  set  out  on  a  last  tramp  through  Natal's 
ankle-deep  sand  in  an  effort  to  reduce  the  surplus  energy  that  is  so 
troublesome  on  shipboard.  There  was  no  danger  of  being  left  behind, 
for  the  Para  was  bottled  up  in  the  harbor  until  high  tide  at  two  in  the 
afternoon.  Groups  of  passengers  came  ashore,  but  I  began  to  fear 
that  my  "company"  had  been  left  behind.  Soon  after  noon  he  of  the 
unpronounceable  grandfather  and  I,  not  to  mention  a  new  steamer- 
chair,  now  that  I  must  take  to  the  sea,  were  rowed  out  to  the  Parci, 
on  which  I  found  to  my  amazement  that  not  only  Carlos  and  the  agent 
of  Vinhaes  but  even  "Tut"  had  squatted  all  day  without  once  going 
ashore ! 

The  exit  from  Natal  harbor  is  as  difficult  as  the  oldest  seadog 
would  care  to  attempt  in  a  large  steamer.  The  long  jagged  reef  has 
only  one  break  in  it,  and  just  inside  that  there  is  a  series  of  sharp  and 
mainly  submerged  rocks.  A  ship  of  any  size,  therefore,  must  make 
a  right-angle  turn  in  almost  her  own  length,  through  an  opening 
barely  her  own  width  by  which  at  low  tide  there  is  scarcely  exit  for 
a  rowboat.  The  rusted  boiler  and  ribs  of  a  steamer  piled  up  close 
beside  the  entrance  showed  that  the  passage  has  not  always  been  as 
successful  as  ours,  and  there  was  a  general  sigh  of  relief  and  a  settling 
down  to  deck-chair  ease  as  the  Para  took  to  pulsating  steadily  across 
a  smooth  blue  sea  toward  the  setting  sun. 

The  coast  pf  Brazil  resembles  Broadway, — a  main  thoroughfare 
along  which,  if  one  travel  it  long  enough,  many  faces  become  familiar. 
There  were  half  a  dozen  men  on  the  Para  whom  even  I,  accustomed 
to  crawl  along  the  land  wherever  possible,  instead  of  following  the 
broad  sea  route  of  Brazilian  travel,  had  seen  before  somewhere — ■ 
along  the  Avenida  of  Rio,  at  some  theater  in  Sao  Paulo,  on  the  streets 
of  Bahia  or  Pernambuco.  If  I  had  ever  wondered  during  my  dust- 
laden,  cinder-bitten,  oft-broken  journey  from  the  Rio  Grande  of  the 
South  to  the  far  different  one  of  the  North  how  Brazilian  ladies  or 
the  more  finnicky  of  their  male  contemporaries  travel  from  one  city 
to  another,  here  was  the  answer.  They  take  to  the  sea,  either  in  one 
of  the  foreign  ships  that  ply  up  and  down  the  coast  or  in  the  some- 
times no  less  luxurious  steamers  of  their  own  national  line. 

The  "Lloyd-Brazileiro,"  like  the  "Central  Railway,"  is  operated  by 
the  Brazilian  Government,  and  is  thereby  subject  to  many  of  the 
same  misfortunes.     If  one  can  believe  a  fourth  of  the  tales  that  float 


THIRSTY   NORTH    BRAZIL  407 

up  and  down  the  coast,  the  national  temperament  is  as  much  at  home 
on  the  rolling  main  as  on  Brazilian  soil.  Rumor  has  it — and  verifica- 
tion is  often  thrust  upon  the  traveler  who  is  in  the  habit  of  leavinj^ 
his  berth — that  the  line  has  three  times  as  many  employees  as  are 
required, — needy  friends  of  politicians  ranging  all  the  way  from 
pantry-boys  without  potatoes  to  peel  to  captains  and  managers  with 
nothing  to  command  or  direct.  "Deadheads"  are  notoriously  so 
numerous  that  any  Brazilian  who  pays  his  fare  runs  the  risk  of  losing 
caste  among  his  clever  friends.  Congressmen  and  the  like  not  onl\- 
travel  on  government  boats  free  of  charge  as  a  legal  right,  but  carry 
with  them  whole  Brazilian  families,  from  upholstered  mama  and  her 
dusky  maid  down  through  the  whole  stairway  of  children  and  their 
servants  to  the  pet  poodles  and  shrieking  parrots.  Even  the  mere 
citizen  who  plans  to  take  to  the  sea  is  said  to  have  no  difficulty  in 
obtaining  his  ticket  without  the  troublesome  formalities  of  the  pocket- 
book  route — provided,  of  course,  that  his  political  affiliations  are  suit- 
able. Those  are  only  foolish  travelers,  native  or  foreign,  scandal  has 
it,  who  pay,  even  to  New  York,  more  than  the  fare  in  the  class  next 
below  the  one  in  which  they  wish  to  make  the  journey,  for  it  is  a  simple 
matter  to  "fix  it  up"  after  they  get  on  board.  The  "Lloyd-Brazileiro' 
steamers  carry  livestock  and  fowls  as  food  on  their  journeys.  Wiien 
a  ship  arrives  in  Para  or  Manaos,  the  story  runs,  the  steward  sells 
those  that  are  left — and  an  hour  later  he  goes  ashore  and  buys  back 
the  same  animals  for  the  return  trip,  naturally  not  at  the  same  price  at 
which  they  were  sold.  The  line  has  always  been  noted  for  its  generous 
yearly  deficit.  In  1914  the  government  tried  to  sell  it,  but  there  was 
not  a  single  bid.  Private  owners  knew  the  insuperable  obstacles  to 
discharging  or  refusing  to  carry  free  the  swarms  of  political  favorites 
and  putting  the  boats  on  a  paying  basis. 

On  board,  however,  few  evidences  of  these  things  meet  the  naked 
eye.  Outward  propriety,  from  scandalless  grafting  to  frock-coat  and 
spats,  is  a  fixed  Brazilian  characteristic.  The  Para  was  one  of  the 
large  new  ships  of  the  line,  British  made,  and  even  government  owner- 
ship had  not  yet  succeeded  in  ruining  it.  In  the  sumptuous  music-room 
reigned  the  air  of  a  salon  gathering  in  high  society,  the  nearest  ap- 
proach to  luxury  which  many  a  Brazilian  ever  gets.  I  sat  late  into  the 
moonlighted  evening,  broken  by  music  and  attempts  thereat,  idly  com- 
paring and  checking  off  the  pretty  girls  who  flitted  in  and  out  among 
the  rather  pompous  gathering.  There  were  a  few  who,  could  one  have 
extracted  wh.at  they  had  in  place  of  them  and  inserted  brains,  would 


4oS  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

have  made  quite  passable  domestic  ornaments — for  the  few  years 
until  they  were  overtaken  by  that  fatal  faded  fatness  that  comes  so  early 
upon  South  American  women. 

At  ten  next  morning  the  boundless  sea  was  broken  on  the  port  bow 
by  a  long  white  strip  of  sand,  behind  which  gradually  grew  up  a 
shadowy  range  of  almost  mountains.  By  noon,  but  long  after  the 
midday  meal,  we  dropped  anchor  before  Ceara,  capital  of  the  state  of 
the  same  name,  a  flat  and  sandy  town,  with  the  usual  churches  and 
palm-trees  rising  above  it,  as  did  two  dimly  seen  clusters  of  hills 
against  the  fathomless  horizon. 

Ceara  is  the  worst  landing-place  on  the  coast  of  Brazil,  being  no  port 
at  all  but  merely  a  sandy  shore,  marked  by  a  lighthouse  far  out  on  the 
end  of  a  tongue  of  sand  and  open  to  all  the  winds  from  off  the  North 
Atlantic.  What  it  might  be  in  bad  weather  was  not  hard  to  guess,  for 
even  with  the  slight  swell  of  a  calm  and  cloudless  day  the  scores  of 
heavy  rowboats  and  freight  barges  that  came  out  a  mile  or  more  to 
meet  us  rolled  and  pitched  like  capering  schoolboys.  That  we  would 
be  ducked  in  getting  ashore  was  taken  for  granted,  that  being  a  com- 
mon disaster  in  the  port  of  Ceara ;  my  fears  were  rather  for  our  outfit, 
which  seemed  several  times  on  the  point  of  being  hopelessly  smashed 
or  dropped  overboard  before  we  got  it  lowered  into  one  of  the  toy 
barges.  Even  passengers  have  been  lost  here,  and  the  rusted  carcass 
of  an  old  steamer  lay  piled  up  on  the  beach.  At  the  shore  end  the 
landing  facilities  were  even  worse.  A  high  and  flimsy  wooden  wharf 
thrust  itself  far  out  to  barge  depth  where,  with  the  boat  rising  and 
falling  twenty  feet  or  more  with  every  swell,  half  a  dozen  languid 
negroes,  tugging  at  the  extreme  end  of  an  often  too-short  rope  and 
liable,  in  their  Brazilian  apathy,  to  let  go  at  any  moment,  slowly  hoisted 
our  travel-battered  old  maroon  trunks  upon  it.  To  have  dropped 
almost  any  one  of  them  would  have  meant  the  immediate  canceling  of 
the  Kinetophone  tour  of  Brazil. 

As  things  were  landed  on  the  wharf,  negroes  put  the  lighter  articles 
on  their  heads  and  straggled  ashore — not,  of  course,  without  mishaps. 
One  haughty  lady,  returning  from  Rio  or  Paris,  had  among  her  be- 
longings six  huge  pasteboard  boxes,  which  she  or  her  maid  had  care- 
lessly tied  shut,  and  which  an  equally  careless  negro  tried  to  carry  off 
all  at  once  without  securing  them.  He  had  taken  three  steps  when  the 
roaring  sea  wind  picked  two  boxes  off  his  head,  opened  them,  and 
tossed  the  latest  creation  in  headgear  and  feathers  into  the  sea,  a  fate 
from  which  another  dream  in  pink  and  froth  was  saved  only  by  being 


THIRSTY    NORTH    BRAZIL  409 

stepped  on  by  a  barefoot  but  unusually  quick-witted  nej^ro.  They 
would  not  have  been  cheap  hats  anywhere,  and  in  Brazil  they  cer- 
tainly would  have  cost  four  times  as  much.  The  owner  having  already 
gone  ashore  before  the  mishap  occurred,  the  negro  waded  out  into  the 
surf  and  rescued  the  feathered  contraption,  which  he  put  back  into  the 
box  and  delivered  as  if  nothing  had  hapi)ened,  getting  his  pay  and 
fading  from  the  landscape  before  milady  opened  the  box  to  prepare 
for  the  gala  first  performance  of  a  new  invention  at  the  municipal- 
state  theater  that  evening. 

It  took  us  four  hours  to  get  all  our  outfit  from  the  ship  to  the  theater. 
Vinhaes,  however,  had  everything  prepared  for  an  immediate  estrea 
under  conditions  that  promised  excellent  results.  By  manipulating 
certain  political  filaments  he  had  obtained  the  "Theatro  Jose  d'Alencar," 
named  for  Brazil's  greatest  novelist  and  the  most  famous  "son"  of 
Ceara.  It  is  government  owned  and  the  most  important  one  in  north- 
eastern Brazil,  generally  closed  except  when  some  second-rate  Caruso 
or  a  European  dramatic  company  comes  to  give  Fortaleza  the  sensation 
of  being  the  center  of  the  universe.  The  nominal  sum  of  130$  covered 
the  salaries  of  the  countless  government  employees  attached  to  the 
p'ace,  though  there  was  no  knowing  how  many  permanent  passes 
\'inhaes  had  issued  for  the  five  days  he  had  advertised.  His  posters, 
articles,  and  newspaper  displays  had  penetrated  to  the  last  hut  in  town ; 
and  he  had  even  had  special  tickets  printed,  the  stamping  of  which,  in 
addition  to  the  thousand  and  one  other  things  essential  to  a  proper 
debut,  left  us  little  time  to  loiter  between  the  landing  and  a  hurried 
supper. 

Our  time,  taken  from  the  ship  and  Rio,  was  twenty  minutes  later 
than  that  of  the  town,  so  that  when  I  returned  to  the  theater  at  sunset 
Vinhaes  greeted  me  halfway  across  the  square  with  the  tightly  pursed 
lips  and  the  closely  compressed  fingers  of  the  upraised  right  hand 
which,  in  Brazil's  complete  language  of  gestures,  meant  a  densely 
packed  house.  It  was,  and  more  than  that  the  crowded  audience  was 
getting  vociferous  in  its  demands  for  the  show  to  begin,  that  they 
might  judge  for  themselves  this  new  wonder.  Despite  all  these 
favoring  circumstances  our  opening  came  near  resulting  in  disaster. 
The  state  theater  was  not  equipped  as  a  moving-picture  house.  Vin- 
haes had  hired  the  only  available  lantern  in  town  and  arranged  with  a 
local  operator  to  run  the  ordinary  films  he  had  himself  brought  along. 
But  the  operator  had  not  recovered  from  the  celebration  made  possible 
by  the  advance  he  had  demanded  on  his  wages,  and  the  lantern  was 


4IO  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

so  aged  and  the  lens  so  worthless  that  barely  the  outline  of  the  pic- 
tures reached  the  screen.  Protest  was  rapidly  developing  into  uproar 
when  I  saved  the  day  by  ordering  the  ordinary  films  run  through  our 
special  machine.  This  was  contrary  to  my  contract  with  Vinhaes  and 
something  we  had  never  done  before;  but  I  waived  that  clause  for 
once  and  agreed  to  have  "Tut"  and  Carlos  run  the  whole  show,  pro- 
vided Vinhaes  paid  them  io$  a  night  each  for  their  extra  labor.  Thus 
their  salaries  were  in  a  twinkling  raised  hirh  above  my  own,  while  to 
me  was  left  the  brunt  of  fighting  the  crowd  at  the  door. 

It  may  be  that  his  sudden  and  unexpected  good  luck  turned  Carlos' 
head.  It  was  now  trebly  important  for  the  Kinetophone  to  do  its 
best, — the  ordinary  films  had  been  a  disappointment,  the  house  was 
crowded  with  an  audience  which  would  carry  good  or  bad  word  of 
our  performance  to  every  corner  of  the  city,  nay,  of  all  Ceara,  and 
the  state  president  himself  sat  in  the  center  of  the  regal  central  box, 
surrounded  by  all  the  most  influential  members  of  the  political  and 
social  world.  I  had  chosen  our  program  with  care,  the  introductory 
film  to  be  followed  by  a  portion  of  "11  Trovatore,"  a  well-sung  number 
which  always  delighted  the  higher  class  of  Brazilian  audiences.  As 
the  title  flashed  on  the  screen  a  murmur  of  satisfaction  rippled  across 
the  house.  The  president  readjusted  the  broad  red  ribbon  across  his 
paunch  and  settled  down  for  what  he  plainly  expected  to  bs  a  treat. 
On  the  screen  a  romantic  figure,  dressed  in  the  elaborate  garb  of  the 
days  of  knights  and  troubadours,  advanced  with  the  supreme  grace 
of  medieval  heroes,  at  least  as  it  has  been  brought  down  to  us  by 
Italian  tenors,  and  with  a  princely  gesture  opened  his  mouth  and — 
and  in  the  nasal  twang  of  an  untraveled  native  of  rural  Indiana  said, 
"Gentlemen,  be  seated!"  Carlos  had  put  on  the  record  that  went 
with  our  minstrel  show ! 

All  disasters,  however,  save  death,  may  be  more  or  less  redeemed  by 
hard  work,  good  luck,  and  so  splendid  an  apparatus  as  a  well-operated 
Kinetophone,  and  before  our  performance  was  over  the  audience  had 
advanced  from  resentment  to  enthusiasm,  had  even  burst  forth  in 
loud  applause,  a  social  faux  pas  almost  unknown  at  a  cinema  in 
Brazil.  Chuckles  of  delight  and  flattering  words  could  still  be  heard 
under  the  murmuring,  silver-flecked  palm-trees  when  "Tut"  piloted  me 
to  a  gay  cafe  on  the  main  praqa  and  showed  his  gratitude  by  squander- 
ing a  considerable  amount  of  his  extra  ten  milreis  for  two  small 
portions  of  what  North  Brazil  thinks  is  ice-cream.  Ccarenses  went 
out  of  their  way  to  assure  us  that  we  had  brought  the  finest  music 


THIRSTY   NORTH    RRA7TL  4" 

that  had  ever  been  heard  in  the  state  and  the  best  theatrical  perform- 
ance that  had  ever  been  given  at  such  modest  prices.  Had  we 
come  two  or  three  years  before,  more  than  one  of  them  asserted,  we 
might  hLive  charged  seven  times  as  much  and  packed  the  house  at 
every  one  of  the  ten  performances  we  would  be  obliged  to  give. 

Vinhaes  had  arranged  for  us  in  the  "Pensao  Ritu,"  the  "only 
hotel"  in  Ceara,  as  there  is  only  one  within  even  the  Rrazilian  pale  of 
respectability  in  all  these  northern  capitals.  Considering  what  it  might 
have  been,  it  was  almost  good,  with  a  constant  sea  breeze  sweeping 
through  our  long  and  narrow  room,  which  almost  made  us  forget 
that  we  were  within  four  degrees  of  the  equator.  Rumor  had  it  that 
deaths  from  yellow  fever  were  frequent  in  Fortaleza,  and  though  we 
saw  no  mosquitoes,  "Tut"  and  I  were  careful  to  tuck  in  the  canopied 
mosquito-nets  over  our  beds.  Carlos,  across  the  hall,  scorned  such 
refmements,  or  else  it  was  natural  Rrazilian  carelessness  that  made  him 
sleep,  stark  naked,  as  comes  to  be  the  custom  of  both  native  and 
foreigner,  and  without  any  protection  from  possible  flying  death. 

As  in  the  case  of  Pernambuco,  the  capital  of  Ceara  is  best  known 
to  the  outside  world  by  the  name  of  the  state,  only  in  the  interior 
of  which  it  takes  universally  its  correct  title  of  Fortaleza.  The  old 
fort  which  gives  it  this  name  still  forms  a  part  of  the  public  prome- 
nade near  the  "only"  hotel,  and  to  this  day  old  cannon  point  bravely 
out  to  sea  from  its  several  dry,  grassy  levels.  The  City  of  the  Fort 
is  one  of  the  most  important  towns  of  North  Rrazil,  a  comparatively 
new  city,  for  all  its  antiquity,  rebuilt  since  the  destructive  drought  of 
1845.  Situated  directly  on  the  sea,  without  so  much  as  a  creek  to 
give  its  rowboats  refuge,  it  has  all  the  maritime  advantages,  except  a 
port.  Its  soil  is  sandy,  almost  Sahara-like  in  its  aridity,  and  though 
it  has  some  ten  pragas  shaded  by  castanheiros,  mangos,  palms,  and 
other  magnificent  tropical  trees,  its  vegetation  is  dependent  on  the 
almost  constant  care  of  man.  The  city  water  is  abominable,  even  after 
being  filtered,  and  wise  foreign  travelers — there  seem  to  be  no  foreign 
residents — and  Rrazilians  from  the  south  quench  a  thirst  which  can- 
not but  be  frequent  in  this  climate  with  mineral  water  or  native  beer, 
or  by  melting  the  plentiful  product  of  the  local  ice  factory. 

More  American  windmills  than  in  any  town  of  similar  size  in 
the  United  States  rise  above  the  monotonous  level  of  Ceara.  It  is 
almost  entirely  of  one  story,  for  its  people  know  the  terrors  of  earth- 
quakes and  have  little  faith  in  their  loose,  sandy  soil.  The  private 
buildings  of  two  stories  could  probably  be  counted  on  the  fingers. 


412  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

though  several  churches  in  the  old  Portuguese  style  of  architecture 
and  some  rather  pretentious  government  edifices  bulk  above  the  gen- 
eral mass.  Where  its  right-angled  and  often  wide  streets  are  not 
paved  in  rough,  unshaped  cobblestones  it  is  impossible  to  walk  with 
any  degree  of  pleasure  because  of  the  sand.  The  landscape  reminds 
one  of  the  driest  regions  of  Arizona,  an  Arizona  of  perpetual  July, 
and  it  is  hard  to  understand  how  the  human  race  lives  here — or  why. 
Yet  there  is  a  picturesqueness,  a  pleasing  something  about  Fortaleza 
that  makes  it  more  interesting  than  all  but  the  half  a  dozen  most 
striking  Brazilian  cities.  Its  windows  are  covered  with  wooden  blinds 
hinged  at  the  top,  and  from  these  and  the  doors  peer  upon  the  passerby 
a  constant  double  row  of  people,  except  during  the  midday  siesta.  It 
is  a  curious  custom  of  Fortaleza  to  have  water-spouts  of  tin  or  zinc 
projecting  from  the  low  flat  eaves  well  out  into  the  street,  just  far 
enough  to  deluge  the  pedestrian  whenever  it  does  rain ;  and  these 
are  always  in  the  form  of  a  conventional  alligator,  serpent,  or  dragon, 
the  spout  of  even  the  poorest  house  ending  in  an  open-mouthed 
monster,  the  teeth,  tin  tongue,  toothed  fin  on  top,  and  the  smooth  one 
on  the  bottom  never  lacking.  Vistas  of  these  may  be  seen  for  a 
kilometer  or  more  down  almost  any  street.  The  variegated  bright 
colors  of  the  house  faqades  are  all  that  break  the  monotonous  sym- 
metry of  the  fixed  architecture,  for  originality  does  not  seem  to  be 
a  North  Brazilian  characteristic.  Many  doors  open  so  directly  upon 
the  scanty  or  entirely  missing  sidewalks  that  they  thrust  pedestrians 
off  them — which  serves  them  right  for  not  realizing  that  sidewalks 
are  meant  here  to  be  family  verandas  rather  than  public  passageways. 
Ceara  is  famous  for  its  hammocks — redes,  or  nets,  they  call  them 
in  Portuguese,  for  lack  of  an  exact  v»ord.  They  are  woven  of  cotton 
grown  in  the  state — by  hand  still  in  the  sertdo,  though  by  machinery  in 
town  factories — and  great  h^aps  of  them  lie  for  sale  in  the  most 
nearly  picturesque  market-place  in  Brazil.  This  is  a  large  square 
in  the  center  of  town,  partly  roofed  over,  and  here,  too,  sit  women 
selling  home-made  lace,  which  constitutes  perhaps  the  second  most 
important  industry  of  the  state.  The  hammock  is  the  favorite  bed 
of  the  Cearcnsc,  and  his  lounge,  cradle,  and  easy-chair ;  wherever 
the  visitor  enters,  a  hammock  offers  him  its  lap.  In  and  about 
among  vendors  anrl  l)uyers,  and  down  the  white-hot  streets,  wander 
blind  beggars  led  by  a  sheep,  often  wearing  several  bells  to  announce 
its  coming.  Many  women  and  children,  and  some  men,  wear  about 
their  necks  a  little  black  hand  made  of  ebony,  as  a  protection  against 


THIRSTY   NORTH    BRAZIL  4^3 

the  evil  eye.  The  leisurely  traveler  from  the  south  is  struck  by  the 
scarcity  of  African  blood;  a  full  negro  is  almost  never  seen  and  the 
prevailing  mixture  is  Indian  with  white.  The  flat  head  of  the 
Ccarense  is  legendary,  and  the  average  complexion  is  a  half-burnished 
copper.  Their  own  citizens  admit  that  four  fifths  of  the  people  of 
Ceara  are  mestizos  with  a  greater  or  less  percentage  of  aboriginal 
blood,  and  this  gives  them  an  individuality  among  their  largely  African 
fellow-countrymen,  with  many  of  the  characteristics  of  the  South 
Americans  of  the  Andean  regions.  In  place  of  the  hilarious  indif- 
ference of  blacker  Brazil,  they  face  life  with  the  rather  melancholy 
fatalism  of  the  New  World  aborigines. 

In  their  native  dances,  such  as  the  samba,  the  Cearcnses  display 
tumultuous  passions  and  an  ardent  temperament  in  great  contrast  to 
their  quiet  everyday  manner,  and  the  scent  of  a  merry-making  throng 
of  sweating,  rarely  washed  people  of  the  mestico  rank  and  file  has 
a  suggestion  of  that  of  a  den  of  wild  animals,  mixed  with  the  odor 
of  home-made  perfume.  Politics  is  always  a  seething  pot,  and  the 
bickerings  of  parties  ever  on  the  verge  of  bursting  forth  in  violence. 
The  Ccaroise  is  easily  recognizable  elsewhere  in  Brazil  by  his  speech, 
ihe  peculiar  accent  of  the  region,  especially  in  the  country  districts, 
consisting  of  raising  the  tone  of  the  last  unaccented  syllable  in  each 
phrase,  giving  a  sort  of  singsong  rhythm  and  an  upturned  ending  tu 
each  sentence,  like  the  flip  of  the  tail  of  a  playful  fish.  Fortaleza, 
however,  prides  itself  on  its  modernity  and  worldly-wiseness,  and 
feels  little  but  scorn  for  the  uncouth,  singsongy  mattuto  or  scrtancjo 
of  the  interior,  startled  out  of  his  w^its  by  his  first  encounter  with 
such  extraordinary  manifestations  of  civilization  as  an  automobile 
or  one  of  the  ancient  but  recently  electrified  street-cars  of  the  state 
capital. 

On  Sunday  evening  people  poured  in  upon  us  so  rapidly  that  I 
had  to  stand  like  a  buttress  in  the  middle  of  the  stream,  just  inside 
the  door,  and  split  it  into  two  channels  so  that  our  ticket-takers  could 
do  their  duty.  There  was  one  unexpected  step  just  above  me,  and 
not  too  much  light,  so  that  some  fifty  or  sixty  of  the  ladies  of  Ceara 
fell  into  my  arms  during  the  course  of  the  evening.  It  would  be 
exaggeration  to  say  that  the  majority  of  them  were  worth  embracing, 
though  now  and  then  a  real  gem  appeared  among  the  gravel — just 
the  ones  whose  footing  was  surest.  As  our  theater  belonged  to  the 
state,  of  course  every  third  cousin  of  a  grandniece  of  a  government 
employee  expected  to  march  in  at  will.     Vinhaes  had  arranged  with 


414  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

the  chief  authorities  that  we  were  to  donate  four  logcs,  as  many  upper 
boxes,  and  thirty-five  seats,  and  also  let  in  those  wearing  uniforms. 
But  there  is  no  such  thing  as  satisfying  the  "deadhead"  appetite  of 
Brazilians.  Officials,  from  state  president  down  to  government  boot- 
black, would  not  be  hampered  by  presenting  passes ;  if  I  dared  to  halt 
a  flashily  dressed  courtesan,  the  head  doorkeeper  came  rushing  up 
to  draw  me  aside  and  warn  me  that  it  was  fatal  to  open  strife  with 
that  class,  as  their  political  influence  was  all-powerful.  I  left  it  mainly 
to  Vinhaes  to  curb  the  voracity  of  his  own  countr}men,  but  even 
he  found  the  task  impossible.  As  "deadheads"  multiplied,  he  donned 
his  most  resplendent  black  garb  and  called  upon  the  delegado  of  police, 
offering  to  send  as  many  free  passes  as  he  needed,  if  only  he  would 
not  allow  plain-clothes  men  to  come  in  without  them.  The  delegado 
assured  him  that  three  would  be  sufficient.  He  sent  six  for  good 
measure — and  that  night  almost  the  first  man  to  arrive  was  one 
who  showed  a  document  proving  that  he  was  a  plain-clothes  man 
and  insisted  on  bringing  three  friends  in  with  him.  Vinhaes  opposed 
him  with  un-Brazilian  firmness.  The  man  went  away,  and  soon  after- 
ward the  delegado  and  his  be-diamonded  wife  entered,  whereupon 
Vinhaes  caused  him  to  state  within  hearing  of  all  the  door-keepers 
that  only  those  with  passes  were  to  be  admitted.  Barely  had  the 
illustrious  couple  disappeared  within  when  a  boy  policeman,  wearing 
the  white  uniform  which  takes  the  place  on  Sundays  of  the  week-day 
khaki,  marched  up  to  Vinhaes  and  told  him  that  he  was  under  arrest 
and  must  report  at  once  to  the  delegacia,  on  order  of  the  delegado! 
He  refused  to  go.  The  policeman  returned  to  the  station  and  came 
back  with  still  more  urgent  orders.  Again  Vinhaes  declined  to  obey, 
and  as  the  police  were  about  to  use  force  he  stepped  inside  and  entered 
the  box  of  the  Chief  Justice  of  the  Supreme  Court — to  learn  .that 
the  delegado  knew  nothing  whatever  of  the  order  purported  to  have 
been  given  out  by  him,  which  had  been  signed  in  his  name  by  his 
escribano  on  complaint  of  the  latter's  friend,  the  disgruntled  plain- 
clothes man.  Thereupon  the  boy  policeman  took  to  marching  to  and 
fro,  assuring  everyone  that  he  was  wholly  innocent  in  the  matter, 
and  all  the  policemen  on  duty  gathered  in  a  compact  group  and  spent 
the  rest  of  the  evening  chattering  and  waving  their  arms  excitedly 
over  their  heads.  Sad  fate  it  must  be  to  live  permanently  the  life 
of  the  helpless  native  in  this  land  of  political  pull. 

The  State  of  Ceara  has  long  been  notorious  for  its  seccas,  or  deadly 
droughts.     Of  the  four  or  five  states  in  the  so-called  "dry  zone"  of 


THIRSTY   NORTH    BRAZIL  415 

Northern  Brazil  it  is  the  most  harshly  treated  by  the  moisture-sponging 
trade  winds.  An  all-wise  native  editor  has  it  that  "in  Ceara  there  has 
always  been  less  lack  of  water  than  of  instruction  and  practical  knowl- 
edge of  the  most  rudimentary  notions  of  agronomy."  A  simple  hot- 
air  pump  would  do  wonders,  he  contends,  for  wood  is  plentiful ;  and 
even  crude  wind-mills  with  cloth  sails  have  been  known  to  make 
garden  spots  of  the  driest  parts  of  the  state.  All  this  may  be  true 
enough,  but  the  traveler  in  primitive  South  America  never  ceases  to 
marvel  at  the  improvidence  of  wilderness  people,  which  often  costs 
them  so  dearly.  High  as  he  stands  in  some  respects  among  his  fellow- 
Brazilians,  the  Cearense  has  not  the  energy  and  initiative  needed  to 
overcome  his  one  great  natural  disadvantage — at  least  as  a  people, 
and  even  the  editor  admits  that  individuals  could  do  nothing,  since 
to  supply  themselves  with  a  special  source  of  water  would  merely 
be  to  have  all  their  neighbors  camp  upon  them  in  dry  weather. 
Hence  the  state  continues  to  endure  periodical  drought  and  famine 
with  Indian  fatalism,  dying  off,  emigrating  to  the  Amazonian  region, 
or  awaiting  a  change  in  the  weather,  "como  Deus  quere — whatever 
God  wishes." 

They  call  1877  "O  Anno  da  Fome" — "The  Year  of  Famine" — in 
Ceara,  but  there  have  been  others  nearly  as  deadly.  When  the  never- 
ceasing  winds  from  the  Atlantic  refuse  to  bring  rain  with  them,  or 
carry  it  too  far  into  the  interior,  the  trees  grow  bare,  covering  the 
ground  with  their  leaves,  as  in  lands  where  winter  reigns;  the  naked 
beds  of  rivers  tantalize  thirsting  man  and  beast — the  maps  of  Ceara 
divide  its  streams  between  "perennial"  and  "non-perennial" — even 
the  hardy  roots  of  the  mandioca  dry  up,  and  there  is  nothing  left  but 
flight  or  death.  In  the  worst  years  human  skeletons  have  been  strewn 
along  the  trails  from  the  interior  to  Fortaleza ;  and  even  in  the  capital 
sufficient  aid  has  often  been  unobtainable,  so  that  plagues  have  added 
to  the  misery  of  the  hordes  of  refugees,  and  people  have  died  so 
continuously  that  there  has  been  neither  time  nor  energy  to  bury 
them.  Those  wealthy  enougli  to  die  in  their  hammocks  are  carried 
off  in  them;  the  corpses  of  others  are  tied  hands  and  feet  to  a  pole 
and  borne  to  some  sandy  hollow  beyond  the  town,  over  which  hover 
clouds  of  gorged  and  somnolent  vultures.  Many  of  the  starving 
become  earth-eaters,  which  may  postpone  but  not  alleviate  their  fate. 
The  more  enterprising  abandon  what  to  tiiem  is  their  native  land  and 
take  up  life  anew  along  the  Amazon,  enduring  as  best  they  can  the 


4i6  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

gloomy  heavens  and  months  of  constant  rains  which  make  that  region 
so  different  from  their  own  cloudless  land. 

The  opening  up  of  the  Amazon  basin,  and  the  consequent  enormous 
increase  in  the  production  of  rubber,  was  largely  due  to  the  droughts 
in  Ceara.  Nomad  by  atavism  through  his  Indian  ancestors,  the 
irregularities  of  the  season  and  the  impossibility  of  counting  on  a 
certain  to-morrow  has  made  the  Cearense  more  so,  and  it  is  a  rare 
spot  that  has  been  inhabited  by  the  same  family  for  generations. 
First  they  went  to  the  rubber-fields  singly,  then  in  bands,  and  finally 
in  whole  ship-loads,  contracted  and  shipped  by  regular  recruiting 
agents.  In  the  Amazonian  wilderness  they  may  die  of  fevers  or  other 
dread  ailments,  but  at  home  they  are  sure  to  die  of  drought,  so  in 
years  of  extreme  dryness  the  risk  is  worth  taking.  If  they  live 
through  all  the  dangers  of  the  wilderness  along  the  "Sea-River"  and 
escape  the  onslaughts  of  the  swarms  of  touts  and  harlots  of  all  colors 
and  nationalities  who  prey  upon  descending  rubber-gatherers  at 
Manaos  and  Para,  their  return  to  Ceara  is  much  like  that  of  an  Italian 
immigrant  from  America  to  his  native  village.  So  rare  and  so 
important,  in  fact,  is  the  native  of  Ceara  who  returns  from  the  rubber- 
fields  to  his  dry  but  beloved  home  that  a  special  term  has  been  coined 
for  him  ;  they  call  him  a  paroara — one  who  has  been  beyond  Para. 

This  year  the  drought  threatened  to  be  as  bad  as  the  fearful  one 
of  1877 ;  worse,  in  fact,  for  then  at  least  there  was  good  old  Emperor 
Peter,  whose  statue  in  the  praga  just  outside  our  window  testified 
to  Ceara's  gratitude  for  his  timely  assistance;  then  money  was  plenti- 
ful instead  of  all  Brazil  being  wrung  dry  by  a  financial  crisis,  and 
there  was  the  final  resort  of  the  rubber-fields,  which  now  returning 
paroaras  were  reporting  useless  because  of  the  low  price  of  that 
commodity.  Already  tales  of  wholesale  starvation  were  coming  from 
the  vicinity  of  Cratheus,  and  cattle  were  dying  by  hundreds  throughout 
the  interior,  leaving  nothing  but  their  hides  to  recoup  the  owners  for 
their  labor  and  investment.  True,  there  was  an  imposing  government 
department  in  Fortaleza  known  as  the  'Tnspectory  of  Works  against 
the  Droughts,"  but  the  country  people  knew  only  too  well  that  this 
was  mainly  a  means  for  political  rascals  to  make  hay  out  of  their 
sufferings. 

From  Fortaleza  what  was  originally  called  the  "Estrada  de  Ferro  de 
Eaturite,"  but  which  had  recently  changed  its  nationality  and  become 
the  "Brazil  North  Eastern  Railways,  Ltd.,"  runs  far  into  the  interior 
of  the  state.     A  journey  to  the  end  of  the  line  and  return,  however, 


TriIi:STV    NORTH    BRAZIL  417 

takes  from  Thursday  morning  to  Sunday  night,  and  I  did  not  dream 
I  could  absent  myself  so  long  until  I  discovered  the  unimportance 
of  Maranguape.  This  nearest  important  town  of  the  interior  was 
a  mere  eighteen  miles  away,  and  as  ten  days  must  be  passed  between 
steamers,  it  seemed  the  best  place  to  spend  our  evenings  after  Fortaleza 
had  had  its  fill  of  the  Kinetophone.  There  was  more  green  along 
the  way  than  the  constant  cry  of  "secca  mcdonha"  (horrible  drought) 
had  led  us  to  expect,  but  it  was  largely  in  trees  and  bushes,  with 
grass  almost  wholly  lacking.  Beside  the  track  lay  scattered  expensive 
iron  pipes  from  abroad  that  were  some  day  to  bring  sufficient  water 
to  the  capital,  if  they  did  not  rust  away  first.  These,  we  learned, 
represented  another  of  Brazil's  government  scandals.  State  officials 
had  been  given  a  hundred  and  fifty  thousand  contos  ($5o,ooo,cxx3) 
by  recent  legislation  with  which  to  bring  Fortaleza  a  suitable  water 
supply.  They  found  it  necessary  to  spend  a  year  or  more  in  Europe 
before  finally  ordering  pipe  specially  cast,  with  the  name  "Ceara" 
embossed  on  each  length  of  it.  When  thousands  of  these  had  been 
tossed  upon  the  beach  at  the  capital  and  scattered  for  fifty  miles  or 
more  along  the  railroad,  the  politicians  reported  that  the  money  had 
given  out,  and  Fortaleza  continues  to  drink  such  water  as  it  can 
dig  out  of  its  own  sand-holes  by  hand  or  by  windmill. 

An  hour  out  we  began  to  draw  near  the  clusters  of  hills  we  had 
seen  from  the  sea.  A  little  branch  line  circled  the  base  of  them 
and  at  length  brought  us  to  Maranguape,  spread  a  bit  up  the  lower 
skirts  of  the  range.  It  proved  to  be  a  sleepy  village,  fairly  large, 
for  it  lay  scattered  for  long  distances  in  both  directions,  but  of  that 
grass-grown  temperament  which  promised  little  reward  for  our  efforts. 
The  promise  was  only  too  exactly  fulfilled.  The  sound  of  shod  foot- 
steps was  so  rare  in  Maranguape  that  everyone  hurried  to  the  doors 
whenever  we  passed,  leaving  behind  us  a  long  trail  of  motionless, 
open-mouthed  faces,  and  we  were  surrounded  and  hemmed  in  by 
curious  ragamuffins  and  innumerable  children— the  one  unfailing  crop 
of  Ceara,  wet  or  dry — until  we  were  forced  to  use  violence  to  get 
room  to  move;  yet  few  families  had  energy  enough  to  come  across 
the  street  to  see  what  was  unquestionably  the  greatest  novelty,  if  not 
the  best  show,  that  had  ever  come  to  Maranguape.  Even  while  our 
performance  was  at  its  height,  however,  the  town  remained  squatted 
in  family  groups  before  its  doors,  cracking  the  same  aged  jokes, 
exchanging  the  same  petty,  malicious  gossip,  indulging  in  the  same 
banal  pseudo-courtesies  as  their  great-grandfathers  did  and  as  their 


4i8  WORKING  NORTH  FROJ^I  PATAGONIA 

great-grandchildren  probably  will.  One  fellow  to  whom,  curious  to 
get  the  local  point  of  view,  I  put  a  question,  replied,  "En  quero 
primeiro  ouvir  o  bicho  roncar — I  want  to  hear  the  beast  snore  first; 
then  if  it  is  good  I'll  come  to-morrow."  It  was  hard  to  believe  that 
Maranguape  was  the  birthplace  even  of  Rodolpho  Theophilo,  a 
pharmacist  who  has  written  several  readable,  if  amateurish,  novels  on 
life  in  drought-stricken  Ceara.  Our  total  receipts  that  evening 
amounted,  at  the  current  exchange,  to  seventeen  dollars ! 

There  was  reported  to  be  a  hotel  by  a  waterfall  half  an  hour's 
walk  up  the  hillside.  "Tut,"  Carlos  and  Vinhaes  trudged  there  after 
our  miniature  audience  had  been  hustled  out,  but  I  preferred  to  stay 
near  the  railway  station.  There  was  not  even  a  restaurant  in  the 
town  proper,  and  I  could  only  get  a  lump  of  stale  bread  in  one  shop, 
an  ancient  can  of  American  sardines  in  another,  and  wash  them  down 
with  "caju  wine,"  a  concoction  which  the  seller  assured  me  was 
"magnificent,"  but  which  outdid  the  strongest  medicine  I  had  ever 
taken.  I  swung  my  hammock  in  the  cinema,  the  manager  having 
induced  the  owner  to  permit  me  to  open  one  barred  window  to  save 
me  from  drowning  in  my  own  perspiration,  and  brought  a  moringa 
of  water  to  save  me  from  death  by  thirst. 

Dawn  found  me  on  my  way  back  to  the  main  line  to  catch  the 
weekly  train  to  the  end  of  it.  A  narrow-shouldered  locomotive 
dragged  the  four  freight  and  six  passenger  cars  made  in  Delaware 
away  from  th2  little  heap  of  hills  into  what  might  best  be  called  a 
jungle,  though  there  were  few  large  trees  and  no  really  dense  vege- 
tation. The  leaves  were  everywhere  shriveled  or  curled  together, 
as  if  striving  to  protect  from  the  malignant  sun  their  last  suggestion 
of  moisture.  The  dry  air  was  so  clear  that  the  arch  of  heaven  seemed 
higher  and  the  horizon  more  vast  than  I  had  ever  known  them  before, 
and  the  light  falling  from  this  greater  height  of  cloudless  sky  struck 
the  ground  with  doubly  blinding  clarity  and  seemed  to  spray  out  in 
all  directions,  like  falling  water.  A  few  stagnant  puddles  in  the 
depressions  of  the  land  were  all  that  remained  of  the  long-forgotten 
rains.  Of  vegetation  the  most  striking,  and  at  the  same  time  the 
most  numerous,  were  the  caniaiiba  palms  for  which  Ceara  is  famous. 
The  caniauba  is  much  smaller  than  the  royal  palm,  of  girlish  slender- 
ness,  its  leaves,  shaped  like  those  of  our  j)alm-leaf  fans,  arranged  in 
symmetrical  sphere  shape  as  carefully  as  the  netted  hair  of  a  modest 
young  lady.  There  is  nothing  of  the  careless,  lop-shouldered  cocoanut 
nor  of  the  haughty  majesty  of  the  palma  imperial  about  the  caniauba; 


THIRSTY    NORTH    BRAZIL  419 

rather  is  it  chic  and  dainty.  The  royal  palm  is  a  regal  lady  always 
])roudly  garbed  in  rich  plumes,  but  of  no  great  worth,  except  orna- 
mentally. The  cocoanut  palm  is  a  slouchy,  disheveled  weneh  given 
to  hanging  about  negro  huts  and  tropical  beaches,  producing  only 
water  and  a  bit  of  copra,  sufficient  to  save  herself  from  destruction. 
The  carnauba,  on  the  other  hand,  is  not  only  a  modest  and  pretty,  but 
a  very  useful,  young  lady,  who  stays  at  home  and  attends  to  business, 
no  matter  what  the  provocation  to  go  down  to  the  beach  and  play 
with  the  sea  breezes.  She  is  as  typical  of  the  Cearcnse  landscape 
as  the  parasol  pine-tree   is  of   the   southernmost  states   of   Brazil. 

The  carnauba  is  useful  from  crown  to  toe;  like  a  certain  animal 
familiar  to  our  stockyards,  nothing  but  its  murmur  is  devoid  of  utility. 
Among  other  things,  it  was  of  fibers  and  wax  from  the  carnauba  that 
were  made  the  first  phonograph  records  and  some  of  the  first  electric 
light  filaments.  This  wax  is  one  of  the  important  exports  of  the  state 
and  of  its  railroad.  The  leaves  are  taken  inside  a  closed  hut  and 
threshed  until  the  wax  falls  in  white  powder,  which  is  then  swept  up 
and  reaches  us  in  many  forms,  from  seals  to  shoe-polish.  I'Vom  it 
the  natives  make  their  candles,  almost  the  only  form  of  light  used  in  the 
interior.  Exported  in  more  ambitious  quantity,  the  wax  alone  would 
enrich  and  occupy  half  the  people  of  Ceara.  From  the  roots  of  the 
carnauba  is  made  a  purgative,  and  a  kind  of  farinlia  of  inestimable 
value  in  times  of  famine.  The  leaves  are  woven  into  hats,  mats, 
baskets,  brooms,  and  the  roofs  of  houses ;  from  them  comes  the  palm- 
leaf  fan  with  which  we  are  familiar.  Fibers  useful  for  many  purposes 
are  taken  from  the  inside  of  the  trunk,  the  iron-hard  wood  of  which 
serves  many  purposes,  ranging  from  musical  instruments  to  water- 
pipes.  The  pulp  of  the  fruit  has  an  agreeable  taste,  as  does  the  seed, 
aftar  being  roasted.  From  the  latter  comes  a  saccharine  substance 
similar  to  sago.  When  small  it  serves  as  food,  and  it  may  be  turned 
into  wine  or  vinegar.  Lastly,  the  seeds  are  used  as  birros,  knobs 
to  which  native  lace-makers  tie  the  ends  of  their  threads,  and  the 
clickit) -click  of  these  may  be  heard  all  over  northern  Brazil. 

Unfortunately  the  drought  was  beginning  to  choke  even  this  paragon 
of  usefulness,  and  some  of  the  lower  leaves  had  turned  sear  and  brown, 
breaking  the  perfect  symmetry  of  tiie  sphere.  Sometimes  the  only 
representative  of  plant  life  that  survives  the  scccas  is  the  joazciro,  a 
dense-green,  haystack-shaped  tree,  the  leaves  and  branches  of  which 
are  cut  and  fed  to  cattle  as  a  last  resort.  The  leaves  of  this  tree  fall, 
still  green,  in  September,  and  new  ones  immediately  take  their  place. 


420  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

There  is  another  tree  of  Ceara  that  furnishes  a  natural  soap,  but  its 
oily  stench  is  so  offensive  that  until  some  means  is  found  of  neutraliz- 
ing this,  only  the  poorest  people  will  use  it. 

The  manager  of  the  Ceara  railway  was  an  English  F.  R.  G.  S. 
who  had  not  lost  his  energy  during  long  tropical  residence,  and  we 
made  good  Brazilian  time  in  spite  of  a  heavy  train  and  the  war-time 
necessity  of  making  steam  of  wood  rather  than  coal.  A  few  isolated 
houses  were  scattered  up  the  low,  thick-wooded  ridges,  and  towns 
were  almost  frequent.  Torrid  as  it  was  under  the  unclouded  sun, 
tlie  more  pretentious  natives  wore  clothing  as  dark  and  heavy  as  we 
of  the  North  in  April  or  October.  Coffee  was  available  at  every 
station,  but  little  else  could  be  had,  sometimes  mangos  and  oranges, 
or  hot  milk  served  at  scandalous  prices  by  old  women  little  less 
distressing  in  appearance  than  the  beggars.  There  was  a  constant 
procession  at  every  station  of  lame,  halt,  blind,  and  especially  the 
unwashed,  rubbing  their  unsoaped  hands  along  the  window-sills  and 
imploring  "a  charity,  for  the  love  of  God  and  our  Lady  Mary  and 
by  the  saints  in  Heaven!"  Others  of  these  unfortunates  marched 
through  the  aisles  of  the  cars,  so  that  one  was  beset  on  all  sides  by 
offensive  caressing  hands.  Those  who,  for  some  reason,  could  not 
reach  us,  were  almost  as  annoying  with  their  "Psio !"  as  Brazilianj 
spell  their  ubiquitous  hiss  to  attract  attention.  How  weary  one  grows 
of  this  short,  shrill,  nerve-startling  "Psio!"  here  and  "Psio!"  there, 
everywhere,  all  day  long  and  far  into  the  night,  up  and  down  the 
whole  country ! 

Baturite,  once  terminus  of  the  line  to  which  it  gave  its  name,  is  a 
town  of  some  size,  sitting  placidly  among  low  foothills.  Some  of 
these  small  isolated  ranges  are  high  enough  to  snatch  a  little  moisture 
from  the  passing  trade  winds  and  turban  themselves  in  clouds  that 
gave  them  a  mantle  of  green,  but  such  slight  patches  were  of  little 
use  t3  the  thirsty  state  as  a  whole.  All  the  region,  both  rolling  plains 
and  hills,  had  a  soft  velvety-brown  color,  everywhere  besprinkled  with 
stocky  joazciro  trees.  Many  of  these  were  already  being  cropped 
to  feed  the  starving  cattle.  Here  and  there  smaller  trees  of  deep- 
striking  roots  had  retained  their  color,  but  most  of  the  vegetation  was 
bare  and  leafless  as  our  own  in  midwinter,  the  landscape  growing 
more  and  more  oppressive  as  we  proceeded  inland.  Early  in  the 
afternoon  rugged  granite  hills  began  to  break  the  horizon  until,  at 
Quixada,  there  were  great  rows  of  them.  Solid  masses  of  granite 
heaped  up  into  big  hills  stood  in  soldierly  formation  for  miles  along 


THIRSTY    NORTH    DKAZIL  421 

the  track,  like  a  guard  of  honor,  magnificent  heaps  sufficient  to  build 
all  the  edifices  the  world  could  need  for  a  century. 

Quixadu  means  in  tiie  aboriginal  Tupi  "lean  cow,"  and  there  were 
a  few  such  animals  there  to  bear  out  the  appellation.  A  mule-car 
staggered  away  to  somewhere  up  in  the  rock  hills.  Granite,  piled  in 
fantastic  ridges  and  forming  most  striking  sky-lines,  followed  us  for 
a  long  distance.  Everywhere  was  dead-bare  ground,  without  even 
a  sprig  of  grass,  and  the  air  was  so  devoid  of  moisture  that  it  dried 
up  the  nostrils,  so  clear  thnt  one  could  see  plainly  the  slightest  mark- 
ings on  the  granite  heaps  far  away  on  the  otherwise  flat  horizon  and 
marvel  that  the  train  took  so  incredibly  long  to  reach  them.  We 
rumbled  frequently  over  bone-dry  creeks  and  rivulets ;  once  we  crossed 
a  huge  four-span  iron  bridge  over  a  river  not  only  without  water  but 
even  without  moisture.  Yet  if  the  Ccaroiscs  lack  rivers  in  times  of 
drought,  it  is  probably  because  they  let  them  all  flow  madly  away  to 
the  sea  after  the  rains,  instead  of  damming  them  up  and  using  the 
water  for  irrigation.  All  day  there  was  scarcely  a  sign  of  cultivation, 
and  very  few  cattle  or  even  skeletons  of  them.  No  doubt  they  were 
farther  back  among  the  hills,  where  mud-holes  still  existed.  A 
cotton  tree  of  moderate  size  seemed  to  grow  wild,  but  it,  too,  had 
succumbed  to  the  general  fate  and  we  ground  monotonously  on 
through  a  sun-flooded  landscape  of  bare  bushes  not  unlike  the  cliapar- 
ral  of  Texas. 

Quixeramobim  bore  slight  resemblance  to  its  aboriginal  meaning  of 
"fat  cow,"  and  the  land  beyond  was  still  more  dreary.  Exclamations 
of  "secca  medonha !"  rose  within  the  car  whenever  we  passed  a 
family — men,  women  and  children,  gaunt,  ragged,  sun-bleached  and 
jungle-travel-worn — tramping  north  with  all  their  miserable  posses- 
sions, consisting  mostly  of  blackened  pots  and  pans  on  their  heads. 
They  were  off  after  water,  of  course,  since  their  own  mud-hole  had 
dried  up,  and  might  be  forced  to  tramp  all  the  way  to  the  coast,  or 
even  go  on  to  the  Amazon,  before  they  could  again  find  means  of 
grubbing  out  a  livelihood.  Long  stretches  of  country  as  deadly  as 
an  elderly  rattlesnake  exhausted  our  weary  eyes,  and  the  train,  as  if 
it,  too,  were  worn  out  by  twelve  hours  of  this  dreary  monotony,  at 
length  halted  for  the  night  in  Senador  Pompeu. 

We  were  at  once  mobbed  by  a  throng  of  self-styled  hotel-keepers 
and  baggage-carrying  ragamuflins,  and  I  was  soon  imprisoned  in  an 
interior  room  without  ceiling  in  which  there  was  not  even  a  bed, 
but  only  three  hammiuM<.s  hanging  listlessly   from  hooks  in  the  mud 


422  WORKING  NORTH  FROAI  PATAGONIA 

walls.  I  threw  these  outside  and  put  up  my  own,  then  set  out  for 
a  stroll.  The  Southern  Cross  and  Great  Dipper  were  exactly  at  the 
same  height.  The  surrounding  landscape  consisted  chiefly  of  dried-up 
cotton  bushes,  and  the  trade  wind  howled  across  it  as  if  we  were 
still  on  the  seacoast,  instead  of  nearly  two  hundred  miles  inland.  A 
night-school  of  ragged  urchins  was  in  full  swing  in  one  of  the  mud 
huts,  but  it  was  run  much  like  a  crap  game.  Here  everyone,  from 
hotel  proprietor  to  street  gamins,  called  me  "doctor,"  possibly  because 
I  still  wore  the  resemblance  to  a  white  collar.  What  a  mongrel  race 
they  were!  If  one  were  picking  a  team  of  men,  they  would  be 
harder  to  match  in  color  than  horses.  Nor  was  there  any  connection 
between  color  and  social  position.  A  ragged  blond  farmer  might 
be  seen  cringing  and  baring  his  head  before  a  pompous  black  politician 
— though  for  the  most  part  negroes  were  scarce  and  lowly.  Around 
a  long,  loose-jointed,  wooden  table  my  fellow-passengers  wolfed  the 
never-varying  Brazilian  meal  as  only  Brazilians  can,  shoveling  it  up 
in  great  knifefuls  and  racing  away  to  begin  an  all-night  uproar  of 
gambling  and  prattle. 

It  would  not  feel  natural  to  go  on  a  railway  journey  in  Brazil  with- 
out getting  up  in  the  middle  of  the  night  to  catch  a  five  o'clock  train. 
When  we  rumbled  away  it  was  still  pitch  dark,  and  as  the  old  kerosene 
lamp  in  the  car  blew  out  I  fell  asleep  again.  From  daylight  on  there 
were  many  piles  of  wood  for  the  engines  along  the  way,  and  the  white 
bones  of  cattle  lay  scattered  through  the  brown  brush.  Here  and 
there  a  few  rib-racked  animals  were  eating  leaves.  Men  in  brown 
leather  hats,  each  twisted  and  warped  by  sun,  rain,  wind,  and  indi- 
vidual use  into  a  distinctive  shape,  appeared  at  the  rare  stations. 
The  fiat  land  grew  almost  swampy,  with  now  and  then  a  hint  of  green, 
and  at  10:30,  with  only  a  scattering  of  passengers  left,  we  drew  up 
at  Iguatu,  265  miles  from  the  coast,  and  the  end  of  the  line.  Iguatu 
is  completely  beyond  the  land  of  beds.  The  room  I  got  in  a  sort  of 
miniature  caravansary  was  furnished  with  two  hooks,  and  nothing 
more.  To  these  I  managed  to  add  a  table  and  chair,  with  a  moringa 
of  what  passed  for  drinking-water;  and  there  was  a  shower-bath 
available  whenever  one  could  coax  a  man  to  lug  a  can  of  water  up 
a  ladder  and  fill  another,  perforated  and  suspended  from  the  roof. 
Midday  was  no  time  to  stroll  in  such  a  climate.  I  swung  my  ham- 
mock and  fell  to  reading  by  the  light  of  a  glassless  window  that 
looked  out  upon  a  white-hot  world  in  which  the  sheer  sunshine  fell 
like  molten  iron  on  every  unsheltered  thing. 


THIRSTY   NORTH    BRAZIL  423 

I  was  back  again  below  the  sixth  parallel  of  longitude,  for  to  go 
inland  from  the  capital  of  Ceara  means  journeying  south  rather  than 
west.  The  town  was  flat,  with  the  usual  sandy  praqa,  a  windmill 
in  its  center,  and  tile-roofed  mud  huts  scattered  in  every  direction. 
One  really  could  not  feel  much  sympathy  for  a  people  who  depend 
for  water,  for  life  itself,  on  a  few  mud-holes  that  may  dry  up  at  any 
time.  Clothing  is  considered  merely  an  adornment  in  Iguatu,  and 
children  in  sun-proof  hides  were  playing  everywhere  in  the  sand. 
The  people  prided  themselves  on  being  caboclos,  or  native  Brazilians 
for  generations  back,  and  though  there  were  a  few  blonds  scattered 
among  them,  the  great  majority  were  of  part  Indian  blood,  with 
negro  mixtures,  but  no  full-blooded  Africans.  The  treacherous,  surly 
cabra,  as  the  Brazilian  calls  the  cross  between  Indian  and  negro,  when 
none  of  that  class  is  listening,  was  in  considerable  evidence.  There 
was  a  child-like  simplicity  about  the  inhabitants  which  recalled  those 
of  Diamantina,  though  here  the  preponderance  of  Indian  blood  made 
the  general  indifference  a  matter  of  fatalism  rather  than  racial  cheer- 
fulness. Many  of  the  inhabitants  had  an  indistinct  notion  that 
England,  London,  Europe,  and  New  York  were  all  different  names 
for  the  same  place — a  place  in  which  was  being  waged  the  great  war  of 
w-hich  they  had  heard  rumors.  One  man  asked  me  in  great  earnestness 
whether  it  was  true,  as  some  visitor  had  once  asserted  without  winning 
credence,  that  "there  are  places  in  the  world  where  it  is  so  cold  you  have 
to  w^ear  garments  on  your  hands."  In  this  region  patriotism  is  a  matter 
of  separate  mud-holes.  A  makeshift  waiter  to  whom  I  was  attempt- 
ing to  make  some  kindly  remark  about  Iguatu  interrupted  me  with, 
"Eu  nao  sou  filho  d'aqui,  nao,  s'nho' — I  am  not  a  son  of  here  but 

of  ,"  naming  some  other  mud  town  identical  with  this  one  but 

which  to  him  was  as  Rome  is  to  Oshkosh. 

There  were  many  picturesque  countrymen  about  the  market-place. 
Goat-skins  and  cow-hides  are  the  most  important  commerce  here, 
especially  with  the  drought  killing  great  numbers  of  cattle,  and 
caboclos,  burned  a  velvety  brown  by  the  blazing  sunshine,  rode  in 
with  a  few  sun-dried  cow-hides  and  sold  them  for  what  the  merchants 
chose  to  give,  which  seemed  to  be  three  znntcms  a  kilogram,  or  less 
than  a  cent  a  pound.  Every  possible  thing  is  made  of  leather  in  this 
land  where  starving  cattle  make  it  so  plentiful — ropes,  boxes,  curtains, 
hats,  even  clothing.  Nearly  all  the  men  wore  hats  some  two  feet 
in  diameter,  most  of  them  made  of  leather,  the  cheaper  ones  merely 
of  cow-hide,  which  twists  into  uncouth   shapes   with  long  exposure 


424  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

to  the  elements,  the  better  ones  of  sheep-  or  deer-skin.  The  others 
were  woven  from  the  carnaiiha  leaf,  looking-  much  like  the  coarsest 
of  our   farmers'  straw  hats. 

I  had  concluded  to  buy  the  largest  hat  to  be  found  in  the  shops 
when  I  caught  sight  of  an  unusually  fine  one  on  the  head  of  a 
powerful  and  handsome  young  native  in  the  crowd  that  was  watching 
me  from  the  street.  When  I  had  overcome  the  mixture  of  pride  and 
bashfulness  in  which  nearly  all  cahoclos  wrap  themselves,  I  learned 
that  his  name  was  Joao  Barboso  de  Lera,  and  that  the  hat  had  been 
made  to  his  special  order  by  an  old  woman  expert  living  some  ten 
miles  away.  It  was  most  elaborately  decorated,  and  it  was  evident 
that  its  possession  raised  the  wearer  high  above  the  rank  and  file  of 
his  fellow-townsmen.  His  hat  is  to  the  youthful  Cearense  of  the 
interior  what  spats  and  silk  cravats  are  to  the  urban  Latin-American. 
Joao,  however,  may  have  been  in  financial  straits,  for  when  I  hinted 
in  a  mild  and  easily  repudiated  voice  my  willingness  to  buy  his  head- 
gear, he  astonished  me  by  accepting  at  once.  It  had  cost  him  twelve 
milreis  and  was  almost  new ;  he  thought  ten  would  now  be  a  fair 
price  for  it.  I  concealed  my  delight  as  we  walked  together  to  my 
lodging,  where  Joao  deposited  the  hat  on  my  table,  crumpled  up  in 
his  hand  the  bill  I  handed  him,  and  wishing  me,  with  a  friendly  but 
diffident  smile,  a  joyful  future,  strode  away  bareheaded  through  the 
gruelling  sunshine. 

Later  I  learned  that  he  was  a  valoroso,  almost  a  bandit,  who  had 
"shot  up"  a  neighboring  town  only  a  few  days  before  and  had  several 
assassinations  to  his  discredit.  The  hat  is  of  cow-hide,  covered  with 
fancifully  patterned  sheep-skin,  weighs  almost  two  pounds  and 
measures  two  feet  from  tip  to  tip,  though  the  crown  is  little  larger 
than  a  skull-cap.  How  the  natives  endure  these  under  a  cloudless 
tropical  sun  is  beyond  northern  conception,  but  the  Cearense  country- 
man considers  them  the  only  adequate  protection.  Whole  suits  of 
leather  are  also  worn  in  this  region,  tight  trousers  for  riding,  a  short 
coat,  and  a  sort  of  apron  from  neck  to  crotch  in  lieu  of  waistcoat, 
the  whole  ordinarily  costing  less  than  ten  dollars.  Whether  or  not 
the  wearer  overtaken  by  rain,  followed  by  another  space  of  the  blazing 
sun,  is  removed  from  this  garb  by  a  taxidermist  is  another  of  the 
unsolved  mysteries  of  the  picturesque  state  of  Ceara. 

At  Iguatu  tobacco  was  sold  in  black  rolls  as  large  as  a  ship's 
hawser,  being  wound  round  a  stick  in  ropes  thirty  or  forty  yards  long 
and   sewed   up   in   leather    for   muleback   transportation.      A   kind   of 


THIRSTY   NORTH    BRAZIL  425 

sedan  chair  on  a  mule,  with  canvas  or  leather  curtains  and  fitted 
inside  with  cushions  and  all  the  comforts  of  home,  is  still  used  by 
the  few  wealthier  women  obliged  to  travel.  The  railway  goes  on 
quite  a  distance  into  the  interior,  but  though  there  was  a  big  two-span 
iron  bridge  near  town  across  a  mud  gully  that  might  be  a  river,  traftic 
has  been  abandoned  beyond  Iguatu,  The  track  southward  was 
wrinkled  and  twisted  out  of  all  possible  use  as  a  railroad,  and  great 
heaps  of  rails  which  the  company  had  hoped  some  day  to  lay  all 
the  way  to  the  frontier  of  the  state,  and  perhaps  beyond,  were  rapidly 
rusting  away  in  the  ruthless  climate. 

The  chief  cause  of  this  railway  stagnation  was  Padre  Cicero  and 
his  cangaceiros.  Father  Cicero  is  one  of  the  chief  celebrities  of 
Brazil,  his  name  being  known  from  the  Uruguayan  to  the  "Venezuelan 
boundaries.  Thirty-two  leagues  beyond  Iguatu  is  the  town  of  Crato, 
of  some  importance  industrially,  and  three  leagues  east  of  this  lies 
Joazeiro,  said  to  have  more  inhabitants  than  Fortaleza,  though  they 
are  nearly  all  fanatical  followers  of  their  local  saint,  living  in  mud 
huts  and  all  more  or  less  of  African  blood.  Here  Padre  Cicero,  a 
saint  in  the  purely  Catholic  sense  of  the  word,  reigns  supreme. 
He  is  an  old  man,  past  his  three  score  and  ten,  a  native  of  Crato, 
who  took  orders  in  the  seminary  of  Bahia  and  became  parish  priest 
of  Joazeiro.  The  conviction  of  some  woman  that  he  had  cured  her 
of  an  ailment  by  miracle  gave  him  the  by  no  means  original  idea  of 
establishing  a  shrine  with  a  "miraculous  Virgin."  Credulous  fools 
were  not  lacking,  and  Joazeiro  soon  became  the  most  famous  place 
of  pilgrimage  in  North  Brazil,  at  least  among  the  lower  classes.  Three 
large  churches  were  built,  and  so  persistently  did  people  flock  thither 
and  settle  down  within  immediate  reach  of  miraculous  assistance  that 
Padre  Cicero  soon  became  too  powerful  to  be  handled  by  the  state 
government.  His  picture  occupies  the  saint's  place  in  all  the  country 
houses  of  the  region,  and  he  was  said  to  have  more  than  ten  thousand 
followers,  variously  called  cangaceiros  and  jagunqos,  whom  he  could 
use  either  as  workmen  or  as  a  sort  of  outlaw  force  to  impress  his 
will  upon  the  region.  The  trade  winds  which  dry  up  the  northern 
part  of  the  state  begin  to  drop  their  moisture  in  the  vicinity  of  Crato 
and  Joazeiro,  making  them  green  and  fertile  and  giving  the  outlaw 
priest  an  added  advantage.  Several  expeditions  have  been  sent 
against  him  and  he  has  been  a  prisoner  in  Fortaleza,  Rio,  and  Rome, 
but  always  returns  to  power.  Suspended  by  the  Church,  he  is  said 
to  live   up   to  the   papal   order  by   merely   confessing  and   baptizing, 


426  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

without  saying  mass  oi  otherwise  conducting  himself  as  a  full-fledged 
priest.  Those  of  a  friendly  turn  of  mind  toward  him  assert  that 
Father  Cicero  is  a  "good  and  pious  man,  a  strict  Catholic,  who  is 
doing  his  duty  as  he  sees  it  and  who  has  no  other  fault  than  too 
great  a  liking  for  money." 

There  is  always  talk  of  this  or  that  part  of  Brazil  seceding;  Ceara 
has  already  partly  done  so,  thanks  to  the  power  of  Padre  Cicero. 
He  is  really  the  ruler  of  an  autonomous  state,  from  whom  even  the 
delegado  and  other  government  ofacials  take  their  orders.  For  years 
the  roads  of  southern  Ceara  have  been  unsafe,  for  his  followers 
have  robbed  and  killed  with  impunity,  torturing  and  mutilating  natives 
who  oppose  or  give  evidence  against  them,  levying  on  political  oppo- 
nents, the  rich,  and  merchants,  though  they  have  seldom  ventured 
to  trouble  foreigners.  They  call  themselves  "romciros"  (pilgrims  or 
crusaders),  and  the  federal  government  has  no  more  been  able  to 
conquer  them  than  to  put  down  the  quarrel  between  the  States  of 
Parana  and  Santa  Catharina.  Padre  Cicero  deposed  the  president 
of  Ceara,  and  when  a  regiment  of  federal  troops  was  sent  to  put 
down  his  "jagungos"  they  were  treated  as  brothers  by  the  fanatics 
and  threw  their  weight  against  the  state  authorities.  Like  Rio  and 
Nicthsroy,  the  state  was  declared  in  a  state  of  siege  by  "Dudii,"  but 
those  who  know  their  way  about  the  political  labyrinth  of  Brazil  claim 
that  the  soldiers  ostensibly  sent  to  put  down  the  bandits — and  who 
did  more  robbing  and  killing  than  the  outlaws  they  came  to  suppress — 
had  secret  orders  from  the  national  boss,  the  "odious  gaucho,"  to  aid 
the  cause  of  the  priestly  despot.  However  that  may  be,  Padre  Cicero 
continues  in  full  command  of  the  region,  all  commerce  of  which  is 
in  his  hands.  He  has  surrounded  Joazeiro  with  a  high  granite  wall 
and  smuggled  in  overland  from  Santos  quantities  of  arms  and  am- 
munition, among  them  several  cannon.  He  is  notorious  among 
Brazilian  priests  for  his  reputation  of  living  up  to  his  vows  of  chastity, 
though  the  rumor  persists  that  this  is  due  to  physical  drawbacks 
which  have  finally  developed  into  his  present  mania  for  power  and 
wealth.  Old  and  feeble  now,  he  had  an  Italian  secretary  and  a 
complete  stafif,  including  a  treasurer,  and  was  said  to  do  nothing 
but  play  saint  and  strengthen  the  belief  of  his  followers  that  upon 
his  death  he  will  immediately  appear  among  them  again  in  another 
form.  This  last  would  seem  to  be  a  golden  opportunity  for  an 
experienced  actor  with  the  proper  qualifications  and  ample  courage. 

The  entire  ragged,  leather-hatted  town  of  Iguatu  was  down  to  see 


THIRSTY    NORTH    BRAZIL  427 

us  off  the  next  noon,  wriggling  the  fingers  of  a  crooked  hand  in 
friendly  farewell,  as  is  the  Brazilian  fashion.  They  are  a  simple, 
good-hearted,  superstitious  people,  looking  outwardly  like  fierce 
bandits,  yet  really  childlike  in  their  harmlcssness,  unless  they  are  led 
astray  by  fanaticism  or  designing  superiors.  We  had  to  struggle  for 
seats  because  the  thirty-four  country  people  whom  the  government 
was  assisting  to  go  to  the  rubber-fields  of  the  Amazon,  rather  than 
have  them  die  at  home  of  the  drought,  overflowed  from  the  second- 
class  car  into  the  first.  Many  of  these  were  pure  white  under  their 
tan,  but  a  more  animal-like  lot  of  human  beings  could  scarcely  be 
found  in  an  ostensibly  civilized  country.  Ragged,  dirty,  sun-scorched, 
prematurely  aged  by  the  rough  life-struggle  with  their  ungenerous 
soil  and  climate,  their  personal  habits  were  as  frankly  natural  and 
un-selfconscious  as  those  of  the  four-footed  animals.  Children, 
ranging  from  the  just-born  to  the  already  demoralized,  rolled  about 
the  car  floor,  while  men  and  women  alike  constantly  passed  from 
mouth  to  mouth  bottles  of  miserable  native  cachaza  and  crude  pipes, 
both  sexes  generously  decorating  the  floor  with  their  expectoration — 
a  rare  thing  m  South  America.  All  this  would  have  been  more  nearly 
endurable  had  they  had  any  notion  of  their  own  drawbacks,  but' 
they  were  as  convinced  of  their  own  equality,  if  not  superiority,  as 
are  most  untutored  people — a  semi-wild  tribe  lacking  the  virtues  of 
real  savages. 

Everywhere  the  talk  was  of  rain,  to  the  Cearense  the  most  important 
phenomenon  of  nature.  Even  the  women  knew  cloud  possibilities  and 
studied  the  horizon  constantly  for  signs  of  storm.  They  ended  their 
more  forceful  sentences  not  with  "if  God  wishes,"  but  "se  chover — if 
it  rains."  A  man  bound  for  the  Amazon  was  holding  one  of  the  many 
babies  when  it  played  upon  him  that  practical  joke  for  which  babies  of 
all  races  and  social  standings  are  noted.  "Menina!"  he  cried,  "Parece 
que  a  secca  ndo  'sta'  tao  grande  aqui,  iido! — Girl!  It  looks  as  if  the 
drought  were  not  so  great  here,  eh !" 

In  fact,  the  drought  was  broken  that  very  night.  We  had  halted 
again  at  Senador  Pompeu — where  the  scrtaiicjos  refused  to  pay  more 
than  a  milreis  each  for  hotel  accommodations  and  slept  out  in  conse- 
quence— and  I  had  at  last  fallen  asleep  in  spite  of  the  incessant  rumpus 
of  my  fellow-guests  when  I  was  awakened  by  a  heavy  downpour.  With 
daylight  the  domes  and  sugar-loaves  and  heaps  of  granite  hills  among 
which  the  train  picked  its  way  stood  forth  ghost-like  through  a  blue 
rainv-season  air  with  an  appearance  quite  different  from  that  under  a 


428  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

blazing  sun.  Heavy  showers  continued  throughout  the  day,  and  as  the 
last  rain  had  fallen  ten  months  before,  joy  was  freely  manifesting  itself. 
Even,-where  people  were  congratulating  one  another,  showing  perfect 
contentment  whether  they  were  forced  to  keep  under  shelter  or  to 
wade  about  in  the  downpour,  talking  of  nothing  but  the  rain,  the  sound 
of  which  on  his  roof  is  to  the  Cearense  the  sweetest  of  music.  It  was 
remarkable  how  nature,  too,  responded  to  the  change.  I  could  not  have 
chosen  a  better  four  days  in  which  to  make  the  trip  to  Iguatu,  for  these 
had  given  me  both  the  drought  and  the  resurrection.  The  whole  region, 
dry,  brown,  and  shriveled  three  days  before,  was  already  a  sea  of 
bright  green.  Leaves  opened  up  overnight  as  they  do  only  in  a  month 
or  six  weeks  in  the  temperate  zone,  giving  the  effect  of  seeing  midwinter 
followed  by  late  spring  in  a  single  day,  a  jungle  magic  reminding  one 
of  the  Hindu  tricksters  w'ho  seem  to  make  plants  grow  in  an  hour  from 
seed  to  bloom  before  the  eyes.  Rivers  bone-dry  on  Thursday  were 
considerable  streams  on  Sunday,  with  natives  wading  like  happy  chil- 
dren in  water  where  they  had  shuffled  the  day  before  in  dry  sand.  No 
wonder  these  poor,  misguided  people  of  the  jungle  lose  heart  when  their 
world  dries  up,  and  become  suddenly  like  another  race  when  the  clouds 
again  come  to  their  rescue. 

All  day  long  joyful  cries  of  "Eil-a  chuva !"  (There's  the  rain!) 
sounded  whenever  a  new  shower  burst  upon  us.  Life  at  best  is  rigor- 
ous in  this  climate,  under  the  life-giving  but  sometimes  death-dealing 
sun,  and  only  the  hardy  or  the  helpless  would  have  remained  here  to 
endure  it.  No  wonder  the  Cearense  who  can  by  hook  or  crook  do  so 
becomes  a  lawyer  Avithout  idealism  or  a  shopkeeper  v/irhout  human 
pity.  The  aspect  of  nature  changed  so  magically  that  it  was  hard  to 
judge  what  this  light,  half-sandy  soil  might  be  able  to  do  under  proper 
rainfall  or  irrigation,  so  that  my  first  conclusion  that  northeastern 
Brazil  was  doomed  to  remain  a  thinly  populated  semi-desert  may  have 
been  too  hasty.  Between  showers  the  breeze  gently  moved  the  fans  of 
the  palm-trees,  the  graunas,  or  singing  blackbirds  of  North  Brazil, 
flitting  in  and  out  among  the  carnauhas.  At  Baturite  all  the  Amazon- 
bound  travelers  old  enough  to  own  a  few  coppers  bought  mangos  and 
quickly  made  the  car  look  like  a  bathroom  by  their  furious  attacks  on 
a  fruit  that  has  been  fitly  described  by  a  disappointed  tourist  as  tasting 
"like  a  paint-brush  soaked  in  turpentine."  As  the  negro  blood  and  light 
sand  marking  the  coast  strip  announced  our  approach  to  Fortaleza,  1 
turned  to  the  brakeman  on  the  back  platform  with  a  fervent,  "Well, 
we  are  getting  back  where  we  can  sleep  in  beds  again."     He  gazed  at 


THIRSTY    NORTH    BRAZIL  429 

me  with  a  puzzled-astonished  air  that  caused  me  to  put  a  question.  1 
had  forgotten  the  native  Ccarcnsc's  devotion  to  the  hammock;  the 
brakeman  had  slept  in  a  bed  once  in  his  life — when  he  had  a  broken 
leg. 

1  had  installed  myself  again  in  the  "Pensao  Bitii"  and  was  just 
starting  for  the  theater  when  I  was  held  up  by  another  downpour. 
When  I  finally  entered  the  "Cinema  Rio  Branco"  I  found  it  almost 
empty ;  but  it  would  scarcely  have  been  fair  to  curse  the  first  rain  that 
had  troubled  us  since  early  January  in  Victoria,  especially  one  whicli 
meant  almost  the  difference  between  life  and  death  to  thousands  of 
our  fellow-men.  We  had  done  poor  business  during  my  absence,  due 
mainly  to  the  fact  that  the  ten-day  engagement  forced  upon  us  by  the 
steamer  schedule  was  too  long  for  Ceara.  At  Maranguape  my  three 
companions  had  lived  in  an  old  hammock-hotel  up  in  the  hills  where  a 
natural  spring  furnished  splendid  swimming,  and  where  there  was  no 
charge  for  rooms,  but  merely  for  meals.  On  Friday  the  performance 
was  a  "Benefit  for  the  Santa  Casa  de  Misericordia,"  or  nun's  hospital, 
for  which  I  had  sold  our  part  of  the  show  at  300$  to  Vinhaes,  who  in 
his  turn  had  contracted  with  the  nuns  to  furnish  everything  for  500$. 
But  when  it  was  all  over  the  religious  ladies  had  refused  to  pay,  so  that 
in  the  end  Vinhaes  was  the  loser.  I  relieved  "Tut"  by  running  the 
second  session  myself  to  a  handful  of  people,  while  the  rain  drumming 
on  our  sheet-iron  roof  all  but  drowned  out  the  phonograph,  and 
jjocketed  one  eleventh  as  much  as  I  had  the  Sunday  before  in  this 
gamble  known  as  the  show  business. 

My  last  duties  in  Ceara  were  mainly  of  a  personal  nature,  for  to 
\  inhaes  fell  the  task  of  buying  the  tickets  and  getting  the  outfit  on 
board.  The  Brasil  arrived  about  noon  and  we  were  down  at  the  wharf 
by  two.  only  to  have  our  leisurely  boatmen  nearly  cause  us  to  miss 
the  steamer  and  squat  in  the  sand  another  ten  days.  The  whistle  had 
long  since  blown  and  the  sailing-hour  was  w^ell  past  before  we  even 
started  out  from  the  wharf.  Then  we  lost  our  rudder,  which  was 
re-cued  by  a  negro  rower  who  sprang  overboard  and  was  washed  up 
on  the  beach  with  it,  while  the  heavy  boat  with  all  our  possessions,  not 
to  mention  the  four  of  us,  threatened  at  any  moment  to  capsize.  There 
followed  a  long  struggle  between  time  and  white-capped  swells,  with 
the  lazy  negro  oarsmen  as  referees,  and  we  were  off  at  the  very  mo- 
ment that  the  last  of  our  trunks  went  into  the  hold. 


CHAPTER  XVIII 

TAKING    EDISON    TO   THE    AMAZON 

WHEN  he  was  quite  a  young  man  Edison  failed  to  get  to  Brazil 
for  the  same  reason  that  I  had  failed  to  get  home  from  Rio — 
his  ship  did  not  sail.  He  had  journeyed  as  far  as  New  Orleans 
in  quest  of  adventure,  and  before  another  chance  came  he  met  an  old 
Spanish  wanderer  who  advised  him  by  all  means  to  remain  in  the 
United  States.  It  would  probably  be  difficult  to  write  on  one  page 
what  humanity  owes  that  unknown  Spaniard.  Later,  when  his  inven- 
tions had  begun  to  make  him  world  famous,  the  former  trainboy  sent 
a  man  to  search  all  the  Amazon  region  for  materials  to  be  used  in  his 
experiments — and  it  was  our  privilege  to  take  the  finished  product 
back  to  the  land  which  the  inventor  himself  had  never  reached  in 
person - 

The  Brasil  is  one  of  the  three  smaller  and  older  boats  of  the  govern- 
ment line — which  is  the  reason  we  had  much  more  space  in  our  two 
staterooms  and  considerably  better  attendance,  for  these  boats  are  not 
popular  with  "deadhead"  politicians  and  their  families.  The  cabin 
passenger  list  was  made  up  of  the  usual  conglomeration  of  every 
human  color,  nationality,  social  and  moral  standing,  from  priests  to 
several  of  the  most  repulsive  old  adventuresses — treated  outwardly 
with  complete  equality  even  by  mothers  of  corruptible  daughters — from 
clean-cut  young  Englishmen  to  licentious,  shifty-eyed  Brazilian  mulat- 
toes.  But  the  real  sight  was  the  steerage  quarters  on  the  three  decks 
in  the  nose  of  the  ship.  Here  men,  women,  and  children — the  thirty- 
four  latest  refugees  from  the  interior  among  them — bound  for  the 
rubber-fields  were  so  packed  together  that  individual  movement  was 
impossible.  Such  a  network  of  hammocks — above,  across,  under,  over 
one  another,  the  bottom  of  one  sleeper  resting  on  the  belly  of  his  neigh- 
bor below,  scantily  clad  women  crisscrossing  men  who  had  discarded 
all  but  a  single  short  garment — as  one  could  not  have  believed  possible 
filled  all  the  space,  disputing  it  with  the  animals  and  fowls  the  ship 
carried  as  food.  Sheep  and  pigs  wandered  among  the  no  less  frankly 
natural  passengers ;  six  zebu  bulls  on  their  way  to  improve  the  native 

430 


TAKING  EDISON  TO  THE  AMAZON  431 

stock  at  the  mouth  of  the  Amazon  occui>ied  stalls  in  the  midst  of  the 
lurmoil.  One  venturesome  fellow  had  as  a  last  resort  hung  his  ham- 
mock from  the  roof  above  these  animals,  so  that  whenever  one  of  them 
moved  he  was  lifted  hammock  and  all.  There  was  a  very  exact  de- 
scription of  the  scene  in  the  Cearense  novel  "O  Paroara"  with  which 
I  was  whiling  away  my  time,  and  as  that  was  published  sixteen  years 
before,  conditions  have  evidently  long  been  the  same. 

Early  in  the  afternoon  of  the  second  day  we  picked  up  a  pilot  along 
the  sandy  coast  and  went  over  a  sandbar  into  the  wide  bay  of  Tutoya, 
port  of  the  State  of  Piauhy,  only  a  little  point  of  which  touches  the 
sea.  I  had  at  one  time  planned  to  go  up  the  Parnahyba  River  to 
Thcrezina,  the  capital,  but  inquiry  proved  that  this  would  not  be  finan- 
cially advantageous,  so  that  I  contented  myself  with  this  brief  glimpse 
of  the  state.  Many  Piaxihycnses  came  on  board  from  the  montarias, 
or  ludicrous  native  rowboats  in  which  they  were  transferred  from  the 
giaolas  (literally  "bird-cage,"  but  "river  steamer"  in  Amazonian  par- 
lance) that  were  waiting  to  carry  passengers  back  up  the  river,  and  we 
had  at  least  a  vicarious  acquaintance  with  them. 

When  I  awoke  at  dawn  we  were  already  close  to  the  wanking  light- 
house known  among  liritish  mariners  as  "Maranham,"  and  soon  after- 
ward there  appeared  a  town  rather  prettily  situated  on  a  low  ridge. 
We  anchored  far  out,  and  it  was  more  than  an  hour  before  sailboats 
brought  the  authorities  to  examine  us,  but  that  was  a  small  matter  to  a 
man  with  a  deck-chair  and  a  passable  novel.  In  fact,  there  was  no 
hurry  about  going  ashore,  for  five  days  would  probably  suffice  to 
exploit  the  interest  of  Sao  Luiz  in  the  Kinetophone,  and  the  rest  of  the 
State  of  Maranhao  was  virtually  inaccessible.  More  than  that,  when 
the  local  manager  came  on  board  through  the  ding}'  gray  water  to  pay 
us  his  respects  he  reminded  mc  that  this  was  Wednesday  of  Holy  Week 
and  that  it  would  be  foolish  to  spoil  the  effect  of  our  estrea  by  attempt- 
ing to  compete  with  the  priests  before  Saturday. 

Jn  1612  a  Frenchman  named  La  Ravadiere  founded  on  an  island 
.lear  the  mouth  of  the  Amazon  a  city  which  he  called  Saint  Louis  in 
honor  of  King  Louis  XIII.  Two  years  later  the  Portuguese  drove  out 
the  French  and  the  city  became  the  capital  of  the  province  of  Maranhao 
— aboriginal  name  of  the  Amazon — which  then  included  all  northern 
Brazil  from  Ceara  to  the  Andes.  The  island,  which  is  small,  is  known 
as  llha  de  Sao  Luiz,  and  the  city  is  officially  Sao  Luiz  do  Maranhao, 
though,  like  most  capitals  along  this  coast,  it  is  better  known  to  tlie 
outside  world  bv  the  name  of  the  state.     Its  harbor  is  shallow,  with 


432  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

much  tide,  so  that  when  one  lands,  by  launch,  rowboat,  and  finally  a 
negro's  shoulders,  the  whole  raging  sea  seems  beneath  one,  and  six 
hours  later  the  place  is  a  sand-field,  with  steamers  sitting  high  and  dry 
and  barefoot  crab-hunters  wandering  about  on  it,  as  if  someone  had 
pulled  the  cork  out  of  the  bottom  of  the  ocean. 

A  huge  old  fort  and  stone  wall  face  the  harbor,  and  from  the  landing- 
place  a  stone-paved  street  lined  by  carefully  trimmed,  haycock-shaped 
trees  slants  swiftly  up  to  the  venerable  cathedral  and  the  main  square, 
j>erhaps  a  hundred  and  fifty  feet  above.  Situated  on  a  low,  but  narrow 
and  broken,  ridge,  its  streets  stumble  rather  steeply  up  and  down  in 
places,  and  the  town  is  so  compact  that,  once  ended,  these  passageways 
break  ofif  instantly  into  dense-green  and  almost  trackless  jungle,  except 
the  single  Rua  Grande,  which  goes  on  across  the  island.  Perhaps  it  is 
due  to  its  situation  that  Sao  Luiz  is  cooler  than  its  two  degrees  from 
the  equator  would  suggest,  though  here  the  constant  trade  winds  die 
down,  thereby  saving  the  region  from  tlie  glaring  aridity  which  char- 
acterizes all  that  part  of  the  continent  to  the  eastward.  In  fact,  some- 
where between  Ceara  and  Maranhao  is  the  dividing  line  between  that 
scantily  wooded  semi-desert  and  the  humid,  dense  jungle  of  the  Ama- 
zon basin.  In  many  ways  Sao  Luiz  is  the  most  pleasant  little  capital 
along  the  coast  of  North  Brazil,  and  not  the  least  of  its  charms  is  the 
pleasure  of  again  seeing  grass  and  trees  in  all  the  green  profusion  of 
tropical  lands.  Here  one  begins  to  feel  that  equatorial  humidity  which 
leaves  even  the  clothing  damp  and  sticky;  by  night  strange  creatures 
singing  in  the  prolific  vegetation  mark  Sao  Luiz  as  the  beginning  of  the 
great  Amazonia. 

In  Brazil  it  is  the  custom  to  interview  newspapers  rather  than  to  wait 
to  be  interviewed,  and  immediately  upon  landing  the  local  manager 
hired  an  automobile  in  which  all  of  us  engaged  in  the  "necessary 
courtesy"  of  calling  upon  all  the  editors.  Some  of  them  were  men  of 
real  culture  and  widely  informed,  their  full  Caucasian  complexions 
burned  that  coppery  red  of  those  who  have  lived  for  generations  near 
the  equator.  Even  the  local  cinema  manager,  who  had  never  been  off 
the  little  island  of  Sao  Luiz,  spoke  faultless  French  and  would  not  have 
been  out  of  place  in  the  best  society  of  old  Europe.  A  few,  on  the 
other  hand,  had  traveled  rather  widely,  and  these  were  even  more 
inclined  than  the  others  to  be  dogmatic  in  their  editorial  wisdom.  One 
vivacious  young  editor  of  rather  forceful  and  unusually  attractive  face 
for  Brazil,  who  looked  like  a  white  man  browned  up  for  a  minstrel 
5;how,  who  might  have  been  a  strong  character  and  a  pleasant,  handsome 


TAKING  EDISON  TO  THE  AMAZON  433 

fellow  had  not  some  wanton  ancestor  casually  added  a  bit  of  negro 
blood  lo  his  veins  and  given  him  the  egotistical  volubility,  the  instaJMl- 
ity,  and  the  surliness  of  the  incslico,  had  no  sooner  been  presented  to 
us  than  he  began  talking  like  a  whirlwind  about  tiie  United  States, 
neither  desiring  nor  exi)ecting  to  have  his  opinions  in  any  way  ques- 
tioned, his  attitude  that  of  a  judge  who  means  to  be  kindly  but  who 
regards  his  judgments  as  final.  In  answer  to  one  ([uestion  which  I 
managed  to  thrust  between  his  closely  cemented  words  he  casually 
remarked  that,  though  he  knew  most  of  Brazil  and  had  been  several 
times  to  Europe,  he  had  never  visited  the  United  States,  adding  in 
his  turbulent  flow  of  speech  that  he  had  fear  rather  than  a  desire  to 
do  so  "because  there  life  is  so  intense."  In  the  next  sentence  he  was 
assuring,  and  convincing,  his  native  hearers  that  the  "Collosus  of  the 
North"  was  purely  scientific  and  commercial,  without  the  slightest 
conception  of  or  interest  in  an>-thing  artistic — and  then  suddenly  he 
broke  forth  upon  the  negro  question. 

Next  to  Eahia,  Alaranhao  has  the  greatest  percentage  of  African 
blood  of  all  the  states  of  Brazil ;  hence  this  was  a  natural  topic.  It 
usually  is  between  educated  Brazilians  and  traveling  Americans.  The 
editor's  opinions  on  the  subject  were  those  of  many  of  his  class,  long 
since  familiar  to  us.  There  were  900,000  negroes  in  Brazil,  he  dog- 
matized, in  other  words  about  three  per  cent,  of  the  population (  !),  who 
were  rapidly  being  absorbed  and  would  soon  disappear,  whereas  in  the 
United  States  twelve  per  cent,  of  the  population  were  negroes,  who, 
being  forced  to  resist  the  attitude  of  the  whites,  would  remain  a  race 
apart  and  a  constant  and  growing  menace.  In  two  or  three  centuries, 
he  prophesied,  there  would  be  only  negroes  left  in  the  United  States, 
because  they  "reproduce  like  flies  and  lie  in  the  shade  and  live  to  be  a 
hundred,  while  the  white  men  are  wearing  themselves  out  by  their 
absurdly  intense  living."  Ergo,  Brazil  had  been  far  more  fortunate 
and  wise  in  her  handling  of  the  negro  problem  than  her  great  neighbor 
of  the  North. 

It  was  the  same  old  argument,  the  rock  on  which  the  bulk  of  Bra- 
zilian and  American  opinion  on  this  subject  always  splits.  In  Brazil 
the  negro  is  physically  stronger  and  better  fitted  to  the  climate  than  the 
whites ;  in  the  United  States,  as  a  whole,  the  reverse  is  the  case.  This, 
and  certain  other  difl^erences  overlooked  by  most  Brazilians,  keep  the 
argument  from  becoming  clean-cut.  Yet  is  the  negro,  or  at  least  the 
part-negro,  the  best  type  that  can  j>ermanently  prosper  under  Brazilian 
conditions?    No  one  of  tropical  experience  and  an  open  mind  believes 


434  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

that  the  white  race,  pure  and  unadulterated,  can  maintain  its  high 
standing  for  generations  in  equatorial  regions  without  frequent  rein- 
forcements either  by  training  in,  or  immigration  from,  the  temperate 
zones.  Can  some  such  standard  be  maintained  by  mixing  it  with  those 
to  whom  the  tropics  are  a  natural  habitat?  Is  it  better  to  "wash  out 
the  black"  through  many  generations  of  lowering  the  whites,  to  breed 
a  new  type,  a  kind  of  human  mule,  to  fit  the  climate  and  conditions,  or 
to  keep  the  tw^o  races  strictly,  even  forcibly,  separated?  The  first  is 
the  Brazilian,  the  second  the  American  point  of  view,  and  the  gulf 
between  them  is  not  easily  bridged. 

That  night  we  gave  a  special  performance  for  the  press,  which  was 
attended  by  about  forty  representatives  of  Sao  Luiz'  four  daily  journals. 
This  and  the  ceremonial  visits  were  probably  worth  the  trouble,  for 
the  papers  next  day  were  equally  enthusiastic  about  the  Kinetophone 
and  its  "highly  cultured"  sponsors,  whose  names,  titles,  and  previous 
condition  of  servitude  they  gave  in  full  down  to  the  latest  count  of 
Carlos'  children.  Indeed,  we  became  the  subject  of  the  chief  editorials, 
even  in  the  face  of  religious  competition.  The  most  famous  living 
wielder  of  a  quill  in  Maranhao  took  us  amiably  to  task  for  using  the 
full  name  of  the  inventor  on  our  advertising  matter,  contending — in  his 
paper's  two  most  prominent  columns — that  it  w^as  an  indignity  to  style 
"Thomaz  A.  Edison,  like  any  commonplace  mortal,  a  man  whose  God- 
like gifts  to  the  world  had  made  him  to  all  mankind  for  all  time  the  one 
and  only  EDISON."    Naturally  such  pubhcity  hurt  our  feelings. 

But  the  result  of  all  this  could  not  be  known  for  three  days,  Thurs- 
day and  Friday  being  so  holy  that  even  churches  could  not  ring  their 
bells — for  which  we  gave  fervent  thanks,  well  knowing  that  the  respite 
would  be  soundly  broken  on  Easter  Sunday.  The  "only  one"  in  town 
was  the  "Hotel  Central,"  a  big  colonial  two-story  building  directly 
across  from  the  cathedral,  and  the  French  proprietor  set  a  table  and 
attended  to  business  like  a  Frenchman,  instead  of  being  off  down  the 
street  gossiping.  "Tut"  and  I  had  a  suite  of  two  rooms  shut  off  from 
most  of  the  uproar  of  the  rest  of  the  house,  our  living-room  immense, 
with  three  balconied  double  windows  larger  than  doors  looking  down 
upon  the  tree-lined  promenade  and  a  part  of  the  sea — when  the  tide 
was  in.  Our  huge  four-poster  bed,  as  well  as  the  smaller  one  we  took 
turns  in  occupying,  was  carefully  mosquito-netted,  for  only  white 
foreigners  are  said  to  be  subject  to  yellow  fever.  There  were  ham- 
Tnock-hooks,  never  lacking  in  North  Brazil,  in  all  the  walls.  Of  the 
nahogany  tables,  marble-topped  bureaus,  full-length  pier  glass  in  which 


TAKING  EDISON  TO  THE  AMAZON  435 

to  admire  ourselves,  the  big  cane  settee,  the  comfortable  roomy  cane 
rocking-chairs,  and  the  score  of  minor  convenient  articles  of  furniture 
I  will  say  no  more,  lest  there  be  a  sudden  exodus  to  Sao  Luiz  do 
Maranhao.  To  be  sure,  the  shower-bath  now  and  then  ran  dry,  but 
there  were  really  only  two  drawbacks  to  the  "Hotel  Central," — its 
kerosene  lamps  and  its  "artistas."  Evidently  there  was  no  escaping 
these  self-styled  "actresses"  who  distribute  themselves  throughout  the 
hotels  of  North  Brazil,  though  the  old  Frenchman  assured  us  that  he 
had  always  refused  to  take  them  in  until  the  war-bred  crisis  made 
their  admission  "necessary," 

Being  so  old  a  city,  Sao  Luiz  has  a  finished  aspect  quite  different 
from  many  others  of  more  recent  origin.  It  is  completely  paved  in 
square  cobblestones,  with  very  much  arched  roadways,  and  all  its  nar- 
row sidewalks  of  flat  stones,  polished  by  many  generations  of  feet,  are 
so  slanting  that  one  must  take  care  if  he  would  not,  as  I  all  but  did  more 
than  once,  spill  himself  wrong  end  up  in  the  middle  of  the  street.  We 
had  at  last  outstripped  civilization,  in  its  more  modern  manifestations. 
All  the  way  up  the  coast  each  state  capital  had  put  in  electric  street-cars 
and  similar  contrivances  within  a  year  or  so — that  is,  long  since  I  had 
entered  South  America.  Here  we  had  beaten  invention  to  it,  and  there 
was  genuine  pleasure  in  seeing  drowsy  old  easy-going  mule-cars  again 
— though  we  never  bothered  to  wait  for  them.  Sao  Luiz,  too,  still 
lights  itself  with  matches,  though  that  does  not  mean,  as  it  would 
almost  certainly  in  the  Andes,  that  reading  is  considered  bad  form. 
In  fact,  it  is  called  the  Athens  of  Brazil,  and  quite  justly,  for  all  the 
rest  of  the  country  has  scarcely  produced  as  excellent  a  list  of  literary 
men.  Graqa  Aranha,  Coelho  Netto,  the  three  Azevedo  brothers,  Joao 
Lisboa,  the  historian,  Manuel  Mendes,  who  turned  Virgil  and  Homer 
into  widely  famed  Portuguese  verse,  Teixeira  ]\Iendes,  head  of  Bra- 
zilian Positivists,  and  Gonsalves  Dias,  the  national  poet,  are  but  a  few 
of  the  famous  sons  of  Maranhao.  Of  them  all,  the  most  beloved,  not 
merely  in  Sao  Luiz  but  in  all  Brazil,  is  Dias,  born  of  a  Portuguese 
shopkeeper  of  the  interior  and  his  negro  slave,  and  done  to  death  by 
sharks  when  the  frail  craft  on  which  he  was  returning  from  Europe 
with  an  incurable  ailment  came  to  grief  within  sight  of  the  lighthouse 
on  his  native  shores.  Those  who  are  familiar  enough  with  both  tongues 
to  be  able  to  form  a  judgment,  and  who  have  no  national  prejudices  to 
overcome,  assert  that  as  a  poet  the  impulsive,  licentious  Brazilian  mu- 
latto was  several  rungs  higher  up  the  ladder  than  our  own  Longfellow. 
There  is  a  Pra(,-a  Gonsalves  Dias  in  Sao  Luiz.  and  in  the  center  of  it. 


436  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

.'it  the  top  of  a  tall  column  high  up  among  his  beloved  palm-trees  and 
the  singing  sabids  he  immortalized  in  his  best  known  poem,  is  the  poet's 
statue,  non-committal  as  to  complexion  in  its  white  stone  (or  plaster) 
and  giving  him  the  appearance  of  a  wavy-haired  Shakespeare.  Not  far 
from  this  statue,  overtopping  everything  else  and  giving  an  aeroplane 
view  of  all  the  city,  is  an  old  shot-tower,  of  the  kind  used  in  former 
days  for  the  making  of  bullets  with  the  aid  of  gravitation.  Dogs  are 
distressingly  numerous,  and  the  charcoal  over  which  the  Maranhenses 
cook  in  little  braziers  is  carried  about  tow'n  and  sold  in  small  baskets 
h.anging  six  or  eight  high  at  either  end  of  bamboo  poles.  It  is  a  busy 
town  every  five  days,  when  a  steamer  comes  from  Para  or  the  south ; 
otherwise  it  drifts  along  at  a  contented,  mule-tram  pace. 

On  Thursday  evening  we  stepped  across  to  the  catliedral  and  saw 
the  ceremony  of  the  "Washing  of  the  Feet."  The  bishop,  in  full  purple 
and  attended  by  a  throng  of  assistants  and  acolytes,  without  music  and 
with  very  little  light  as  a  sign  of  mourning,  marched  along  a  raised 
bench  where  twelve  beggars  had  taken  seats  hours  before.  Several  of 
them  were  blind  and  all  of  them  diseased,  and  they  had  been  dressed  in 
white  cotton  gowns  which  partly  concealed  their  natural  rags.  The 
bishop  placed  a  silver  basin  under  a  foot  of  each  in  turn,  spilled  three 
drops  of  water  on  it,  dabbed  them  with  a  napkin,  then  stooped  and 
kissed  the  unsterilized  extremity  almost  fervently,  though  with  some- 
thing in  his  intelligent,  clean-cut  face  which  suggested  that  he  did  not 
particularly  enjoy  this  part  of  his  ecclesiastical  duties.  Each  beggar 
was  given  a  loaf  of  French  bread,  a  copper  coin  worth  nearly  a  cent, 
and  what  looked  like  a  folded  nightshirt,  to  all  of  which  he  clung  with 
both  hands  as  if  expecting  the  densely  packed  throng  of  the  faithful, 
virtually  all  of  whom  could  point  back  to  African  ancestry,  to  snatch 
the  gifts  away  from  him.  That  night  the  same  class  engaged  in  the 
annual  "hanging  of  Judas,"  and  when  morning  dawned  effigies  of  the 
traitor  of  Gethsemane,  in  most  fanciful  and  multicolored  garments, 
swung  by  the  neck  from  a  score  of  improvised  gibbets. 

One  of  the  best  known  residents  of  Maranhao  is  a  hardy  American 
who  came  down  twenty  years  before  to  set  up  in  Caixas  the  first  cotton- 
mill  in  North  Brazil — though  cotton  had  been  grown  there  for  more 
than  a  century.  There  he  married,  became  a  power  in  the  cattle  and 
mining  industries,  and  established  a  line  of  river-steamers  to  that 
jjrincipal  town  of  the  interior.  Brazil,  as  he  put  it,  is  an  easy  country 
in  which  to  make  a  living,  but  a  hard  one  in  which  to  make  a  fortune. 
Once  real  wealth  begins  to  show  its  face,  the  native  politicians  see  to  it 


TAKING  EDISON  TO  THE  AMAZON  437 

that  it  does  not  become  too  swollen.  Cattle  are  the  i>rincipal  prodm  t 
of  the  state,  but  a  sack  of  salt  costing  two  or  three  milreis  in  Sao  Luiz 
to  begin  with,  reached  the  incredible  price  of  24$  in  the  interior.  All 
r.razil,  in  his  opinion,  would  prove  fitted  for  the  white  man,  once  the 
more  temperate  south  was  filled  up;  but  as  yet  only  the  two  hundredth 
part  of  the  republic  was  under  cultivation. 

We  opened  on  Saturday  night  after  the  longest  period  of  idleness 
since  the  Kinetophone  had  made  its  bow  to  lirazil.  It  was  perhaps  the 
combination  of  good  advertising,  after-Lent  reaction,  and  the  fact  that 
Sao  Luiz  gets  few  good  entertainments  that  brought  greater  crowds 
than  we  could  accommodate.  Our  performance,  too,  pleased  more 
than  usual  there,  thanks  among  other  things  to  excellent  acoustic  prop- 
erties and  to  a  few  lines  in  our  introductory  number  from  "O  Canto 
do  Sabia,"  best  known  poem  of  Gonsalves  Dias.  The  result  was  that 
as  often  as  we  chose  to  open  it  we  filled  the  house  so  tightly  that  I  could 
barely  squeeze  in  myself.  Unfortunately  the  remodeled  shop  held  only 
four  hundred,  but  on  the  other  hand  it  was  the  best  managed  theater 
we  had  seen  in  Brazil,  with  "deadheads"  almost  unknown  and  the 
smallest  child  paying  admission.  On  Sunday  we  gave  a  matinee  and 
three  evening  performances,  packing  the  place  so  full  that  we  had  to 
call  upon  the  police  to  restrain  those  who  could  not  legally  be  admitted. 
We  took  up  the  tickets  inside,  as  in  a  street-car,  and  needed  no  door- 
keepers during  the  performance,  for  no  man,  with  or  without  a  ticket, 
could  have  forced  his  way  into  that  sardine-box.  The  street  outside 
was  blocked  with  those  wailing  to  get  into  the  next  sessdo,  the  side- 
walks lined  with  chairs  filled  with  fancily  dressed  women  of  the  "best 
famiUes."  That  day's  income  was  larger  than  we  had  had  since  our 
first  Sunday  in  Pemambuco,  and  a  cablegram  carried  the  news  of  our 
l)opularity  to  the  newspapers  of  Para. 

There  is  only  one  place  to  take  a  walk  of  any  length  in  Sao  Luiz. 
The  Rua  Grande  turns  into  a  passable  road  and  goes  on  across  the 
island,  but  all  other  streets  scon  end  in  swamp  or  jungle.  I  tramped  out 
of  town  one  morning  and  returned  that  afternoon,  having  covered 
fifteen  of  the  twenty  miles  of  island  road  and  return.  It  was  a  joy  to 
walk  on  real  earth  again  after  months  of  wading  in  sand,  and  to  be 
surrounded  on  either  hand  by  a  great  green  wall,  instead  of  a  glaring 
half-desert.  On  the  other  hand,  the  dull  skies  of  the  Amazon  region 
were  already  getting  on  my  nerves,  as  they  do  on  those  who  abandon 
the  almost  unbroken  blue  sky  and  sunshine  of  the  eastern  coast.  Yet  on 
the  whole  Brazil  has  a  remarkably  even  climate   for  so  enormous  a 


438  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

stretch  of  territory,  and  it  was  not  much  warmer  here  than  in  Santa 
Anna  on  the  Uruguayan  border.  Life  out  of  doors  in  the  tropics  is  a 
serious  thing,  however,  and  here  was  the  real,  humid,  densely  jungled 
tropics  of  the  imagination  at  last.  Bamboos  waved  their  titanic  plumes 
above  me ;  a  tree  ablaze  with  scarlet  blossoms  flashed  forth  from  the 
dense  verdure ;  the  fructa-pao,  which  furnishes  its  vegetable  bread  to 
the  poorer  classes  all  the  way  from  Bahia  northward,  here  produced 
far  more  abundantly  than  man  required.  Palms  ranged  from  those  of 
fern-like  delicacy  to  the  coco-hahassi'i,  shaped  like  a  gigantic  feather- 
duster  stood  on  end  and  producing  a  bunch  six  feet  long  of  red  nuts  as 
large  as  our  walnuts.  These  contain  a  kernel  of  cocoanut  meat  rich  in, 
oil,  which  was  just  beginning  to  be  exported  to  Europe,  and  unlimited 
quantities  of  which  could  be  had  for  the  picking  and  cracking.  Butter- 
flies celebrating  their  nuptials  enlivened  the  landscape  with  the  flutter 
of  their  iridescent  multicolored  wings ;  here  and  there  the  sabid,  first 
cousin  to  our  northern  robin,  sang  his  familiar  song ;  once  or  twice  I 
fancied  I  heard  the  mde  da  lua  (mother  of  the  moon),  the  nightingale 
of  Brazil. 

Anil  was  the  largest  of  several  small  tow^ns  along  the  way,  with  a 
mule-car  running  the  length  of  it  on  what  used  to  be  a  little  railroad. 
A  railway  also  runs  across  the  island,  or  at  least  the  rusty  rails  do, 
hoping  some  day  to  reach  the  mainland  by  a  bridge  and  continue  to 
Caixas,  whence  a  line  already  operates  to  Therezina,  capital  of  the 
next  state  east.  Several  genuine  tropical  downpours  forced  me  to  seek 
such  shelter  as  was  available,  and  the  day  was  done  before  I  returned 
to  Sao  Luiz.  There  are  many  delightful  things  in  the  tropics,  but  none 
of  them  equal  the  soft  dusk  of  evening.  Like  most  fine  things,  it  is 
short  and  fleeting,  no  two  minutes  alike,  and  barely  a  few  moments 
seemed  to  pass  between  the  last  livid  rays  of  the  sun,  as  it  veiled  itself 
behind  the  light  band  of  clouds  along  the  horizon,  and  the  falling  of 
moonlight  in  flecks  of  silver  through  the  limply  drooping  fronds  of  the 
palm-trees,  stencilled  in  silhouette  against  the  iridescent  sky  of  a 
tropical  night.  It  was  almost  a  full  year  since  my  last  real  walk,  but 
no  one  in  Sao  Luiz  felt  more  contented  with  life  than  I  that  evening. 
Yet  my  tramp  was  the  only  topic  of  conversation  at  the  cinema,  and  a 
newspaper  referred  editorially  next  day  to  the  "incredible  energy  and 
endurance  of  our  distinguished  North  American  visitor,"  who  could 
cover  thirty  miles  of  Amazonian  ground  on  his  own  feet  in  a  single 
day! 

It  might  have  been  better  for  Carlos,  too,  if  he  had  combatted  the 


TAKING  EDISON  TO  THE  AMAZON  439 

climate  of  the  torrid  North  with  pedestrianisni.  For  some  time  lie  had 
l)een  losing  his  Panlista  energy,  and  with  it  his  interest  in  life.  On  the 
morning  after  my  walk  I  met  him  strolling  languidly  along  the  main 
street,  looking  more  disconsolate  and  colorless  than  I  had  ever  seen  him 
before;  but  those  are  common  symptoms  in  the  tropics  and  I  thought 
little  more  about  it  until  he  failed  to  join  us  at  dinner  that  evening.  We 
found  him  in  bed  in  his  room  across  the  hall,  with  a  raging  fever.  The 
best  recommended  physician  of  Sao  Luiz  having  arrived,  I  hurried  away 
to  the  theater,  where  both  Carlos'  work  and  my  own  awaited  me. 

That  night  he  was  neither  able  to  talk  nor,  apparently,  to  recognize 
me.  The  native  leech  had  diagnosed  his  ailment  all  the  way  from  malaria 
to  bubonic  plague,  and  had  finally  settled  upon  intestinal  grippe.  What- 
ever it  was,  Carlos  was  a  sick  man,  and  when  morning  came  without 
any  sign  of  imi)rovemcnt,  I  set  about  arranging  to  get  him  into  a  hos- 
pital. There  were  two  in  Sao  Luiz,— the  "Beneficencia  Portugueza" 
and  the  "Santa  Casa  da  IMisericordia."  For  several  reasons  I  chose  the 
second.  By  this  time  the  invalid  could  scarcely  raise  his  head,  or  express 
himself,  except  by  monosyllabic  gurgles  and  the  rolling  of  his  blood- 
shot eyes;  yet  it  was  a  labor  of  hours  to  coax  any  of  his  fellow- 
countrymen  to  help  untangle  the  red  tape  that  blocked  his  immediate 
entrance  to  the  hospital.  A  colonel  connected  with  the  cinema  at  length 
agreed  to  go  with  me  to  the  doctor  whose  duty  it  was  to  issue  tickets 
of  admission,  but  he  insisted  on  having  an  automobile  at  io$  an  hour 
with  which  to  cover  the  four  short  blocks  of  stone-paved  street.  When 
the  doctor  and  the  colonel  had  run  through  all  the  gamut  of  Latin- 
American  salutations,  down  to  the  fourth  generation  and  the  family 
cat,  a  gi-eat  many  questions  were  asked  me  before  Carlos  was  finally 
accepted  as  a  patient,  as  if  it  were  an  extraordinary  favor,  though  the 
"Santa  Casa"  was  in  theory  open  to  all.  Then,  a  bit  of  rain  coming 
up,  the  colonel  began  talking  politics  and  remained  for  more  than  an 
hour,  through  three  more  showers.  When  we  finally  entered  our  waiting 
automobile  it  was  out  of  gasoline!  I  raced  back  to  the  hotel,  impressed 
two  carriers  and  a  hammock  into  service,  and  got  our  ailing  companion 
at  last  into  the  hands  of  the  nuns  just  at  nightfall. 

As  the  time  was  drawing  near  when  we  must  move  on,  I  appointed 
the  most  rcsix)nsil)le  man  in  town  unoOlcial  guardian  for  Carlos  and 
turned  over  to  him,  against  ample  receipts,  his  back  pay,  his  salary  to  the 
end  of  the  month,  and  his  fare  back  to  Rio.  This  .should  have  sufficed 
amply  to  pay  his  hospital  bills  and  carry  him  home  with  something  to 
spare,  and  1  had  no  authority  to  give  him  more.    Next  morning  we  dis- 


440  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

covered  that  Carlos  had  taken  with  him  our  (hipHcate  set  of  keys,  and 
*'Tut"  went  up  to  the  hospital  to  get  them.  The  nun-nurse  had  them  in 
safe-keeping  and  would  not  turn  them  over  without  Carlos'  permission. 
He  could  not  talk,  but  after  staring  at  "Tut"  for  a  long  time  he  faintly 
nodded.  After  still  longer  effort  they  succeeded  in  getting,  in  faintly 
whispered  monosyllables,  the  address  of  his  family  in  Sao  Paulo.  As 
"Tut"  w^as  leaving,  a  doctor  bustled  cheerily  into  the  ward  and  casually 
informed  him  that  Carlos  had  yellow  fever. 

The  indifferent  way  in  which  Sao  Luiz  took  such  things  gave  one  a 
creepy  feeling  that  life  was  held  cheaply  in  those  parts.  When  Carlos' 
condition  was  mentioned  to  patrons  of  the  cinema  that  evening  they 
said,  between  yawns,  "Ja  esta  liquidado — Oh,  he  is  finished  all  right," 
and  went  in  to  weep  at  some  silly  film  drama  and  to  giggle  at  Kineto- 
phone  humor.  I  insisted  on  remaining  optimistic.  Had  we  not  heard  a 
hundred  times  that  native  Brazilians  never  die  of  yellow  fever,  that  its 
fatalities  are  confined  to  white  foreigners?  In  other  words,  while  "Tut" 
and  I  were  constant  prospective  candidates  for  an  Amazonian  cemetery, 
a  man  born  in  Sao  Paulo,  accustomed  all  his  life  to  Brazilian  conditions, 
should  be  in  no  great  danger.  I  was  still  telling  myself  these  things  when 
word  reached  us  that  Carlos  was  dead. 

By  this  time  we  were  already  on  our  way  to  Para,  for  ten-day  steamers 
and  theatrical  engagements  wait  for  no  man.  When  three  men  have 
lived  more  closely  together  than  brothers  for  more  than  half  a  year  the 
loss  of  one  of  them  is  an  astonishingly  heavy  subtraction,  one  which  we 
felt  all  the  way  from  the  longer  time  it  took  the  two  of  us  to  tear  down 
the  show  and  send  it  on  board  the  Ceard,  to  all  those  little  daily  reminders 
of  the  loss  of  a  familiar  companion.  Of  course,  when  we  came  to 
think  it  over,  natives  do  die  of  yellow  fever ;  but  as  those  living  in  the 
regions  where  it  flourishes  have  either  died  of  it,  or  recovered  from 
it,  in  childhood,  the  survivors  are  immune  and  the  effect  is  as  if  the 
disease  were  fatal  only  to  Caucasian  visitors.  Besides,  Carlos,  born  of 
Italian  parents  on  the  cool  Brazilian  plateau  more  than  twenty  degrees 
to  the  south,  was  virtually  a  foreigner  up  here  on  the  steaming  equator. 
The  period  of  incubation  being  longer  than  the  time  we  had  spent  in 
Sao  Luiz,  it  was  probably  the  mosquitoes  of  Ceara  that  had  been  his  un- 
doing. 

We  refitted  the  phonograph  with  "Tut's"  automatic  starting  device, 
which  had  fallen  into  disrepair,  so  that  North  Brazil  might  continue  to 
be  amused  as  long  as  one  of  us  survived.  For  our  troupe,  at  least, 
would  perform  while  anyone  remained  to  turn  the  crank.    There  were 


TAKING  EDISON  TO  THE  AMAZON  441 

frail  young  ladies  in  it,  and  very  few  who  were  acclimated  to  tropical 
iravel ;  yet  they  appeared  night  after  night  without  changing  a  hair,  doing 
exactly  as  good  work  as  when  they  left  New  York,  playing  fully 
as  well  to  a  scattering  audience  on  a  sweltering  afternoon  as  to  a  packed 
house  on  a  cool  evening,  never  disturhing  us  with  a  display  of  mood  or 
temperament,  never  showing  the  slightest  impairment  from  the  climate, 
the  soggy  Brazilian  food,  the  thousand  little  tropical  and  Latin-Ameri- 
can annoyances,  and  never  dying  of  yellow  fever.  More  than  once  I 
woke  up  dreaming  that  they  were  suhject  to  all  the  ills  of  living  men 
and  women,  or  sweated  through  a  nightmare  of  trying  to  transport  them 
all  in  a  small  boat,  or  house  them  all  in  a  ten-room  hotel  already  half 
occupied  by  persons  with  whom  respectable  Americans  should  not 
come  in  contact. 

A  broad  light  streak  on  the  ocean  ahead  announced  our  approach 
to  the  mouth  of  the  Amazon,  the  "river-sea,"  as  the  Brazilians  often  call 
it,  discoloring  the  deep-blue  Atlantic  as  far  as  the  eye  could  reach. 
Later  the  water  turned  a  muddy  brown  and  we  began  to  see  the  smoke 
from  the  Para  power-house  across  the  flat  featureless  landscape.  Mo- 
notonous dense  greenery  soon  surrounded  us,  flat,  impenetrable  forests 
spreading  from  the  very  edge  of  the  river  to  infinity  on  either  hand. 
Everywhere  the  vast  stream  was  dotted  with  sailboats,  their  lateen  sails 
all  dyed  some  single  bright  color, — blue,  safTron,  red,  faded  pink.  Then 
flat  wooded  islands  scattered  all  about  appeared,  and  finally  an  opening  in 
the  flat  landscape  disclosed  the  low  City  of  Para,  still  so  far  away  as  to 
be  almost  indistinguishable,  and  before  we  could  steam  up  to  it  swift 
tropical  darkness  had  fallen. 

We  dropped  anchor  for  the  night  before  its  long  row  of  lights,  the 
])assengers  whiling  away  the  evening  with  music  and  dancing,  no  one 
apparently  sorry  to  save  a  hotel-bill  out  in  the  cool  breezes  of  the  quiet 
river.  We  were  so  close  to  the  town  that  we  could  hear  the  night 
life  under  the  trees  in  the  central  praqa  and  see  the  electric  street-cars 
go  frequently  slipping  past.  It  may  have  been  the  sijhit  of  the 
cathedral,  bulking  forth  out  of  the  night  above  the  rest  of  the  city,  that 
turned  the  group  of  Brazilian  men  gathered  on  the  after  saloon  deck 
to  a  discussion  of  religion — though  it  was  not  a  particularly  religious 
discussion.  In  fact,  the  crux  of  every  one  of  a  score  of  anecdotes  was 
the  grafting  of  priests,  and  the  men  one  and  all  agreed  that  the  ecclesias- 
tics were  even  more  diligent  and  clever  at  it  than  politicians ;  but  they 
all  took  care  that  the  women  on  board  should  hear  none  of  their  stories. 

A  steward  called  us  at  daybreak,  escaping  before  I  could  get  hold  of 


442  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

the  revolver  in  the  bottom  of  my  valise.  A  fog  half  concealed  the 
city,  gradually  disclosing,  as  the  equatorial  sun  burned  it  away,  long  rows 
of  docks  and  warehouses,  the  "new"  town  floor-flat,  with  a  watertower 
standing  above  the  rest,  and  a  fish-market  swarming  with  sailboats  and 
clamoring  people,  the  old  city  rising  slightly  on  a  knoll  topped  by  the 
cathedral.  It  was  more  than  two  hours  later  that  the  port  doctor  came 
on  board  to  examine  us.  As  I  replied  "All  right"  to  the  steward  who 
came  to  tell  me  to  report,  and  continued  reading  in  my  steamer-chair 
without  liCaring  from  him  again,  I  fancy  it  must  have  been  a  thorough 
examination.  The  sunshine  was  falling  in  streams  of  molten  lead  when 
we  finally  hoisted  our  mud-hook  and  pulled  up  to  a  dock — for  the  first 
time  since  we  had  landed  in  Bahia.  A  large  crowd,  astonishingly 
European  in  origin,  was  gathered  along  the  quay,  giving  little  or  no 
attention  to  the  heavy  showers  that  every  now  and  then  broke  forth 
from  a  h.alf  cloudless  sky. 

Vinhaes  was  on  hand,  with  a  dozen  newspapers  containing  large 
Kinetophone  displays,  and  together  we  went  down  into  the  hubbub  of 
the  hold,  through  the  chaotic  network  of  third-class  hammocks,  to  fight 
to  have  cur  baggage  landed  in  time  for  an  evening  performance.  A  few 
ports  back  our  phonograph  had  nearly  been  put  out  of  business  by  a 
careless  drayman,  and  since  then  I  had  been  taking  no  chances,  though 
I  had  to  dog  the  steps  of  two  negroes,  ordered  to  carry  it  by  the 
handles,  to  keep  them  from  putting  it  on  their  heads.  In  up-to-date 
Para,  however,  we  had  only  to  have  it  placed  in  a  large  and  luxurious 
taxicab  and  drive  away  with  it  to  the  "Bar  Paraense."  This  half-open 
theater  out  in  the  Nazareth  section  of  town  was  somewhat  more  distant 
from  the  center  than  we  should  have  preferred ;  but  it  was  the  best 
Vinhaes  had  been  able  to  get.  The  labor  of  setting  up  emphasized  the 
loss  of  Carlos,  especially  as  this  was  one  of  those  big  ramshackle  build- 
ings we  now  and  then  came  across  where  it  took  a  score  of  pulleys  to 
carry  our  synchronizing  cord  from  the  booth  to  the  phonograph.  But 
at  least  we  returned  to  comfortable  quarters  when  our  labors  were  over. 
The  "Cafe  da  Paz"  was  as  well  run  under  its  Swiss  maitre  d'hotel  as  a 
high-class  European  hostelry  with  several  tropical  improvements,  and 
as  it  was  owned  by  the  same  cullured  and  upright  copper-tinted  gentle- 
man who  had  a  half  interest  in  the  "Bar  Paraense,"  the  cost  of  our 
excellent  accommodation  was  less  than  we  had  paid  in  some  unspeakable 
hovels.  To  be  sure,  hard  times  had  given  several  rapid  young  ladies 
admission  even  here,  but  they  were  not  on  our  airy  third  story,  with  its 
huge  blind-shaded  windows  and  its  view  of  all  Para.     In  the  halcyon 


s. 


TAKING  EDISON  TO  THE  AMAZON  443 

<lays  of  rubber,  ended  barely  two  years  before,  the  "Cafe  da  Paz"  was 
the  best  hotel  in  North  Brazil,  where  a  small  room  alone  cost  more  than 
we  were  paying  now  for  full  accommodation  and  where  one  paid  2$ 
for  a  place  at  table  and  at  least  as  much  for  each  dish  ordered. 

"Tut"  and  I  had  come  on  the  same  ticket  from  Maranhao.  In 
the  list  of  passengers  published  in  that  evening's  papers  we  apiK.*ared  as 
"Wayne  Tuthill  and  1  child."  At  dinner  we  were  handed  an  order  from 
the  sanitary  department  of  the  State  of  Para,  commanding  "Wayne 
Tuthill  e  Harrey"  to  appear  at  the  yellow  fever  section  for  examination. 
It  was  evident  from  the  document  that  only  one  person  was  meant 
by  this  Latin-American  style  of  double-barreled  name;  but  out  of 
some  mixture  of  curiosity  and  honesty  I  took  it  upon  myself  next 
morning  to  point  out  the  error.  For  my  pains  I,  too,  was  commanded 
to  appear  at  three  every  afternoon  for  the  next  thirteen  days,  under 
penalty  of  fine  and  imprisonment.  I  protested  that  I  could  not  regulate 
my  life  in  any  such  bourgeois  fashion,  and  being  taken  before  the  head 
doctor,  I  informed  him  that  it  was  my  habit  and  intention  to  wander 
about  the  state  during  my  stay  in  Para.  So  effective  was  my  command 
of  Brazilian  super-courtesy  by  this  time  that  he  replied  in  the  same 
,'ein,  saying  all  foreigners  coming  from  either  Ceara  or  Manaos,  where 
yellow  fever  had  broken  out,  were  put  under  observation,  but  that  in 
my  case  it  would  be  sufficient  if  I  would  report  at  any  time  between 
seven  and  five  on  those  days  when  I  happened  to  be  in  town. 

Strictly  speaking,  there  is  no  city  of  Para,  nor  is  it  on  the  Amazon. 
In  161 5  Castello  Branco  left  Maranhao  and  founded  on  the  spot  where 
(he  old  castle  of  Para  now  stands  a  village  at  the  junction  of  the 
(kiajara  and  Guama  rivers.  Both  of  these  are  a  part  of  the  Amazon 
system,  but  they  are  separated  from  the  mouth  of  the  river  proper  by 
the  enormous  island  of  Marajo,  considerably  larger  than  the  Republic 
of  Portugal.  The  Tupinamba  Indians  who  inhabited  the  spot  were 
friendly  to  the  newcomers,  and  as  he  had  left  Maranhao  on  Christmas 
Day,  Branco  named  the  town  Nossa  Senhora  de  Belem  (Our  Lady  of 
Bethlehem)  ;  and  Belem  the  capital  of  the  state  of  Para  is  officially 
and  locally  to  this  day.  Just  two  centuries  later  "Grao  Para"  definitely 
separated  from  the  capitania  of  Maranhao  and  became  a  province,  a 
province  of  slight  importance  then,  in  spite  of  its  enormous  size  and 
unlimited  tropical  forests.  In  1852  a  Paraensc  sent  the  first  steamer  up 
the  Amazon,  but  it  was  not  until  1867  that  the  world's  greatest  river 
was  opened  to  foreign  navigation.  Ten  years  later  the  most  famous 
drought  in  the  history  of  Ceara  sent  thousands  of  Cearenscs  to  open  up 


444  WORKING  NORTH  FROINI  PATAGONIA 

the  great  rubber-fields  of  Grao-Para  and  Amazonas,  from  which  the 
great  riches  of  Belem  and  Manaos  resulted. 

Para  is  distinctly  a  maritime  city,  though  it  is  ninety  miles  from  the 
ocean.  With  the  exception  of  a  short  government  line  to  Braganqa  on 
the  coast  to  the  west,  constructed  in  1877,  one  cannot  go  anywhere 
from  it  except  by  boat.  It  is  almost  less  a  Brazilian  than  a  European 
city,  with  little  brotherhood  for  the  rest  of  the  republic.  In  the  news- 
papers of  Para  "America"  means  New  York,  which  can  be  reached 
from  there  in  two  or  three  days  less  time  than  are  required  for  a 
journey  to  Rio.  It  was  not  until  we  had  met  some  fellow-countrymen 
who  had  been  treading  Broadway  ten  days  before,  long  after  the  re- 
turning senator  of  Para  who  landed  with  us  had  sailed  from  the 
national  capital,  that  we  realized  why  the  eyes  of  Para  are  fixed  on  the 
north  and  east  rather  than  upon  the  great  country  to  the  south  to  which 
it  governmentally  belongs. 

Para  is  an  exotic  growth,  a  bit  of  Parisian  civilization  isolated  in  an 
enormous  wilderness,  which  encroaches  so  constantly  upon  it  that  the 
European  air  of  the  center  of  town  quickly  disappears  in  grass-grown 
alleyways  of  swamp  and  jungle.  The  heavy  rains  cause  this  grass  to 
grow  with  tropical  luxuriance  and  rapidity,  so  that  there  are  many  wide 
streets  laid  out  between  unbroken  rows  of  buildings  that  are  nothing 
but  deep  green  lawns  with  a  cowpath  or  two  straggling  along  them. 
Densest  jungle  may  be  found  a  short  stroll  from  the  central  praqa,  and 
wild  Indians,  living  as  they  did  centuries  ago,  are  only  a  few  hours 
distant.  It  is  an  unfinished  city  of  pompous,  got-rich-quick  fronts  and 
ragged  rears,  with  only  the  old  town  on  its  knoll,  and  the  few  principal 
streets  of  the  new  town  paved  in  stone  blocks.  The  rest  is  much  as 
nature  left  it,  and  while  one  may  find  almost  anything  in  this  little 
culture-importing  heart  of  the  city  which  can  be  had  in  the  centers  of 
civilization,  a  short  walk  brings  one  to  isolated  houses  on  stilts  and 
uninhabited  clearings  through  the  jungle  in  which  men,  driving  carts 
drawn  by  one  bull,  wade  to  their  thighs  cutting  and  loading  grass. 
Scarcely  a  rifle-shot  from  shops  offering  the  latest  Parisian  creations 
one  must  depend,  even  for  life,  on  the  strength  and  agility  of  primitive 
man. 

Para  has  been  called  the  "City  of  Trees."  Corinthian  columns  of 
royal  palms  wave  their  elegant  heads  in  every  direction,  mammoth 
tropical  growths  of  which  we  of  the  North  do  not  even  know  the  name 
shade  the  squares  and  praqas  ;  the  important  streets  and  avenues  are  lined 
with  shade  trees,  in  nearly  every  case  the  mango,  with  whitened  trunks 


TAKING  EUISON  TO  THE  AMAZON  445 

as  a  protection  a^t,'aiiist  tropical  plagues  and  trimmed  to  a  few  main 
branches,  instead  of  being  left  to  its  natural  appearance  of  a  deep- 
green  haystack.  There  is  a  wealth  of  tropical  vegetation  in  parks  and 
gardens,  terminating  with  the  Bosque  Rodrigues  Alves  in  the  outskirts, 
a  sample  of  the  real  Amaiconia,  dense  wild  forest  where  humidity  and 
semi-darkness  reign  and  great  trees  stand  on  tiptoe  straining  their  necks 
in  the  struggle  for  air  and  light  above  the  solid  roof  of  vegetation. 
^'et  the  considerable  market  gardens  on  the  edges  of  town,  tended  by 
Portuguese  and  other  white  laborers,  show  what  European  immigration 
can  and  might  do  against  this  prolific  militancy  of  unl)ridled  nature. 

In  contrast  to  the  surrounding  primeval  wilderness,  there  is  a  sugges- 
tion of  the  vieux  port  of  Marseilles  in  the  Ver-o-peso  (See-the-weight), 
the  old  rectangular  landing-place,  so  named  because  in  the  time  of  the 
monarchy  fish  brought  to  town  were  weighed  there  and  assessed  a  gov- 
ernment tax.  It  is  still  the  chief  port  for  small  vessels,  and  may  be 
found  almost  any  morning  packed  with  sailing  ships,  their  many  colored 
sails  giving  the  scene  an  effectiveness  usually  lacking  in  the  monotonous- 
ly green  aspect  of  equatorial  Brazil.  These  gather  from  all  directions, 
bringing  the  products  of  the  adjacent  mainland,  the  Island  of  Marajo 
opposite,  and  of  the  waters  between,  and  carrying  back  to  the  towns  and 
hamlets  scattered  along  either  side  of  this  false  mouth  of  the  Amazon 
the  products  of  civilization,  ranging  from  French  perfume  to  manu- 
factured ice.  Along  the  quay  of  the  Ver-o-peso  and  for  some  distance 
back  is  the  public  market,  filled  with  many  Amazonian  products  un- 
known in  northern  climes.  First  and  foremost  is  the  pirarucu,  a  fat, 
reddish-brown  fish  sometimes  called  the  "cod  of  the  Amazon,''  so 
huge  that  each  scale  is  nearly  two  inches  across,  less  often  eaten  fresh 
than  salted  and  boxed  in  great  slabs  and  shipped  to  every  community 
along  the  river.  Pirarucu  is  the  beef  of  the  Amazonian  regions,  as 
farinha  is  its  bread.  Turtle  flesh  is  also  in  great  favor,  and  butter  made 
from  the  turtle  eggs  is  the  most  common  in  the  Para  market.  Oil  of 
capivara,  or  river-hog,  of  tapir,  and  even  of  alligator  furnish  the 
Paracuses  their  emulsions.  The  slate  taxes  every  fisherman,  and  the 
federal  government  takes  its  toll  of  every  turtle,  pirarucu,  or  bottle  of 
oil  he  brings  in.  Castanhas,  or  chestnuts,  as  what  we  call  the  "Brazil 
nut"  is  known  at  home,  are  to  be  found  in  great  heaps ;  these  and  cacao 
constitute  the  principal  ])roducts  of  Grao  Para,  with  one  world-famous 
exception.  There  arc  scores  of  such  local  commodities  as  chciro  dc 
mulata,  which  might  be  translated  as  "scent  of  mulatto-girl,"  ground  up 
bark  sold  in  little  packages  and  sprinkled  in  the  frizzled  tresses  of  the 


446  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

purchasers,  both  as  a  perfume  and  to  bring  good  luck.  Of  native 
fruits  wholly  unknown  in  the  temperate  zones  there  are  no  end, — the 
mainao,  better  known  by  the  Spanish-American  name  of  papaya;  the 
graziola,  with  big  green  scales  and  a  cream-like  interior  similar  to  the 
cJiirimoya  of  Andean  valleys;  the  cupuassu,  with  an  apple  taste;  the 
barciiry,  maracaju,  mangaba,  muriixy,  taxperehd,  and  many  others,  less 
often  used  as  table  fruits  than  as  flavoring  to  sorbets  or  ice  cream,  or 
what  a  local  cafe-keeper  stronger  on  mixing  than  on  spelling  advertises 
as  "cookstails."  The  maxixe,  by  the  way,  which  has  reached  the  North 
in  the  form  of  a  Brazilian  rag-time  dance  elaborated  from  Portuguese 
and  African  originals  by  the  negroes  of  Pernambuco  and  Bahia,  is  in  its 
legitimate  sense  an  Amazonian  pepper.  Above  all,  there  is  the  assahy, 
the  small  fruit  of  a  palm-tree  not  unlike  the  date  in  appearance,  from 
which  a  non-alcoholic  refresco  is  made,  reddish  in  color  and  drunk 
with  farinlia.  This  is  so  great  a  favorite  among  Paraenses  that  they 
have  a  saying : 

Quern  vai  para  Para  para;  Whoever  goes  to  Para  stops ; 

Quern  toma  assahy  Hca.  Whoever  drinks  assahy  remains. 

Rubber,  the  second  national  industry  of  Brazil,  is  of  course  the  life 
of  Para,  which  is  the  reason  the  city  had  lost  most  of  its  old-time 
energy.  Not  only  was  the  rubber  market  in  a  chaotic  state  on  account 
of  the  World  War,  but  the  Amazon  was  just  beginning  to  feel  seriously 
♦.he  competition  of  the  planted  rubber-fields  of  Ceylon,  where,  in  contrast 
to  the  high  prices  of  Amazonia,  the  cost  of  living  is  perhaps  the  lowest 
in  the  world.  Warehouses  that  two  years  before  could  not  hold  the 
rubber  that  poured  in  upon  them  now  had  a  few  dozen  of  the  big 
balls  scattered  about  their  huge  floors.  There  they  were  being  cut  up — 
giving  them  a  striking  resemblance  to  dried  meat — to  make  sure  the 
rubber -gatherer  had  not  included  a  few  stones  or  a  low-grade  near- 
rubber  called  caucho  and  packed  in  b.eavy  boxes  of  native  wood  for  ex- 
port. All  Amazonia,  from  the  laborers  who  tap  the  trees  to  the  specu- 
lators and  explorers  and  their  long  train  of  hangers-on,  was  feeling  the 
change  acutely. 

Vinhaes  never  recovered  from  his  astonishment  at  the  diflFerence  be- 
tween this  Para  and  the  one  he  had  known  on  previous  trips.  In  the 
good  old  days  of  only  a  few  months  back  Para  was  sure  it  would  soon 
outstrip  Paris,  so  that  it  had  many  public  and  private  buildings  out  of 
all  keeping  with  its  present  condition,  sumptuous  three-story  structures 
marked  "Municipal  School"  on  the  outside  that  were  mere  dusty  ruins 
within,  pretentious  mansions  sitting  out  wet  and  lonely,  knee-deep  in 


TAKING  EDISON  TO  THE  AMAZON  447 

j^rass,  on  an  imaginary  avenue.  Then  throngs  of  humanity,  all  leaving 
money  behind  them,  poured  in  and  out  of  the  gateway  to  the  Amazon 
To-day,  with  her  chief  commerce  languishing  in  the  throes  of  death. 
Para  was  provincial  again — a  stranger  attracted  attention  and  everyone 
knew  everyone  else.  Even  now  there  were  few  beggars,  tlianks,  i)er- 
haps,  both  to  habit  and  to  the  scarcity  of  negro  blood,  but  in  the  days 
of  prosperity,  we  were  assured,  almost  any  barefoot  Portuguese  car- 
rcgador  had  a  conto  or  two  in  his  pocket.  The  "Theatro  da  Paz,"  built 
in  the  time  of  the  monarchy  more  than  thirty  years  before,  and  the  most 
sumptuous  in  Brazil  until  the  municipal  theaters  of  Rio  and  Sao  Paulo 
were  constructed,  had  not  been  opened  in  months.  On  its  fagade  still 
hung  the  remnants  of  advertising  of  one  of  the  favorite  entertainments 
of  the  old  money-flowing  days: 

Theatro    Da    Paz 

Setembro,    1912 

A  Grande  Revista  Paraense 

BORRACHO  FALSA 

(false  rubber) 

It  had  indeed  played  them  false. 

A  negro  is  almost  conspicuous  in  Para,  and  it  is  a  question  whethev 
tiiere  are  not  more  cahoclos,  that  is,  Indian  mixtures,  than  mulattoes. 
Not  merely  did  the  exploiting  of  the  Amazonian  region  begin  late  in 
the  life  of  the  monarchy,  but  the  northern  part  of  Brazil  freed  its  slaves 
before  the  national  decree  of  emancipation  was  promulgated.  The  city 
itself  rivals  the  southernmost  states  as  a  European  Brazil.  White  men, 
from  English  merchants  to  barefoot  Portuguese  laborers,  their  olive 
skins  seeming  strangely  pale  in  the  blazing  sunshine,  make  up  almost  a 
majority  of  the  population.  It  is  a  dressy,  formal  community  for  all 
that,  and  notwithstanding  the  heat  of  a  sea-level  city  on  the  equator. 
Politicians  in  wintry  garb,  their  high  silk  hats  tilted  against  the  sun  ever 
so  slightly,  an  umbrella  grasped  in  their  sweat-dripping  hands,  may  be 
seen  making  their  way  to  tlie  palace,  on  the  roof-tree  of  which  vultures 
are  languidly  preening  themselves.  Now  and  then  these  overdressed 
gentlemen  cast  a  wise  but  circumspect  eye  upon  the  matnehico  and  mu- 
latto women  passing  with  bundles  on  their  heads,  moving  their  hips 
slightly  yet  conspicuously,  filling  the  air  with  their  ])ersonal  odor  mingled 
with  that  of  the  chelro  de  miilata  sprinkled  in  their  hair,  their  thin  low 
waists  showing  coppery  or  brown  skins  that  are  more  suggestive  than 
nudity.  On  Sunday  afternoons  an  automobile  parade  speeds  up  and 
down  the  Estrada  de  Nazareth,  the  men  stiffly  correct  in  attire  down  to 


448  WORKING  NORTH  FROIM  PATAGONIA 

wintry  woolen  spats,  the  women — but  these  are  most  apt  to  be  European 
adventuresses  who  have  seen  better  and  younger  days,  who  spend  their 
evenings  on  the  stage  of  the  "Moulin  Rouge,"  but  who  now  sit  in  pom- 
pous bourgeois  correctness  in  their  open  taxis,  ever  buoyed  up  by  the 
hope  of  attracting  the  husband  of  some  bejeweled  resident  along  this 
finest  of  Para's  avenues,  a  hope  in  which  they  are  frequently  not  disap- 
pointed. It  is  characteristic  of  the  Brazilian  point  of  view  that  not  only 
do  the  legitimate  ladies  of  these  sumptuous  residences  lean  on  their 
powdered  elbows  at  the  windows  studying  in  detail  their  possible  rivals, 
but  that  they  see  nothing  amiss  in  joining  the  procession,  so  long  as  they 
have  a  close  male  relative  along  to  protect  them  from  scandalous 
tongues. 

There  is  an  old  bullring  in  Para,  but  it  has  long  been  used  only  as  a 
school.  The  two  churches  in  Brazil  at  all  worth  seeing  are  the  Can- 
dalaria  of  Rio  and  the  Se,  or  cathedral,  of  Belem.  The  latter  is  imposing 
in  structure  and  situation  and  has  several  artistic  pictures.  Catholicism, 
however,  by  no  means  has  everything  its  own  way  in  the  metropolis  of 
the  Amazon.  For  one  thing,  there  are  said  to  be  eight  Masonic  lodges, 
with  a  membership  of  nearly  eighty  per  cent,  of  the  male  population. 
Electricity  and  gasoline  have  almost  entirely  taken  the  place  of  the 
screaming  oxcarts  so  familiar  there  not  many  years  ago.  The  "Para 
Electric  Railways  and  Lighting  Company"  had  already  given  the  city 
good  British  service  for  six  years.  The  cars,  unlike  those  in  the  rest  of 
Brazil,  have  a  center  aisle,  probably  because  the  incessant  rains  would 
make  the  crawling  under  side-curtains  an  unendurable  nuisance.  If  any- 
thing, the  division  into  classes  is  more  marked  than  in  Rio  itself.  The 
man  with  a  missing  sock  or  collar  pays  almost  the  same  fare  as  his 
fully  dressed  fellow  and  rides  in  exactly  the  same  kind  of  car,  except 
that  on  the  outside  it  is  branded  with  the  word  "Segunda."  A  famous 
American  ornithologist,  who  knows  more  of  the  interior  of  Brazil  and 
its  bird  life  than  all  Brazil's  thirty  millions,  had  been  standing  on  a  corner 
signaling  in  vain  to  car  after  car  to  carry  him  and  a  suitcase  full  of 
feathered  trophies  out  to  the  Museo  Goeldi  when  it  became  my  pleasure 
to  explain  to  him  the  Brazilian  system  of  "baggage"  street-cars. 

Among  many  forms  of  "fazcndo  i\ta,"  it  is  the  custom  among  the 
elite  of  Brazil  for  the  man  whom  the  conductor  reaches  first  to  pay  the 
fares  of  all  his  friends  ahead  or  behind  him  in  a  street-car.  It  is  what 
the  French  call  a  bean  geste,  but  there  are  times  when  it  has  its  draw- 
backs, especially  in  times  of  "brutal  crises"  and  a  slump  in  the  rubber 
market.    I  rode  out  one  day  on  the  longest  street-car  line  in  Para,  past 


TAKING  EDISON  TO  THE  AMAZON  449 

the  dense  Bosque  screaming  with  parrokects  and  flickering  wiih  beija- 
llores,  not  to  mention  the  large  insane  asyhnn  and  poorhouse,  to  visit 
ihe  Liceo  of  Souza.  With  me  were  the  professors  of  botany,  horticul- 
ture, and  agriculture  from  that  institution.  On  the  way  I  pointed  out 
a  magnificent  tree  which  is  certain  to  attract  the  attention  of  any  for- 
eigner making  that  journey,  and  asked  to  what  species  it  belonged. 
The  three  professors  looked  at  one  another  with  puzzled  faces,  intro- 
duced a  new  topic  of  conversation  in  the  hope  that  I  might  forget  my 
curiosity,  and  finding  me  not  to  be  put  off  so  easily,  one  of  them  replied, 
with  the  air  of  a  sage  handing  out  a  gem  of  wisdom,  "E-e  uma  arvore 
silvestre — it  is  a  unld  tree !"  No  doubt  they  thought  I  took  it  for  a  hot- 
house plant.  But  it  was  an  episode  of  my  return  trip,  alone  with  the 
])rofessor  of  botany,  which  made  the  journey  worth  while.  As  we 
rumbled  along,  halting  frequently  to  pick  up  passengers,  I  noted  that 
he  grew  more  and  more  gloomy  and  taciturn.  Not  until  the  conductor 
arrived  from  the  rear,  however,  and  my  companion  handed  him  the 
equivalent  of  more  than  half  a  dollar  in  fares,  did  I  suspect  the  cause  of 
his  sadness.  The  fare-collector,  it  seemed,  though  the  matter  was  not 
mentioned  by  word  of  mouth,  had  put  off  collection  so  long  that 
more  than  a  dozen  of  the  professor's  friends  and  acquaintances 
had  boarded  the  car,  and  then  the  stupid  fellow  had  begun  his 
duties  with  the  back  seats,  where  the  professor  had  fancied 
himself  safe.  The  result  was  that  common  courtesy  required 
him  to  pay  the  fares  of  nearly  everyone  in  the  car — and  Bra- 
zilian professors  are  little  less  generously  supplied  with  this  world's 
goods  than  their  fellows  elsewhere.  One  by  one,  as  the  conductor 
reached  them  and  refused  their  proffered  coin  with  a  word  of  explana- 
tion, the  men  ahead  turned  around  and  thanked  their  benefactor  with 
as  elaborate  a  bow  as  the  backs  of  street-car  seats  permit,  to  each  of 
which  my  companion  replied  with  a  sweeping  gesture  of  the  right  hand 
suggesting  intense  pleasure  and  unlimited  largess.  But  the  street-cars 
of  Para,  as  in  most  of  Brazil,  run  on  the  European  zone  system,  and 
there  were  four  or  five  separate  sections  to  be  paid  before  we  reached 
the  center  of  the  city.  We  were  just  starting  from  the  second  junction- 
point  when  the  professor  suddenly  clutched  at  me  and  dived  off  the 
car.  I  might  have  been  puzzled,  had  I  not  noted  the  extreme  yet 
casual  care  with  which  he  examined  the  next  car  for  possible  acquain- 
tances before  we  boarded  it — well  up  toward  the  front. 

"You  should  never  divide  an  ox-hide  until  you  kill  the  ox,"  say  the 
cahoclos  of  Brazil.    Vinhaes  and  I  had  fully  expected  to  make  a  small 


450  WORKING  NORTH  FROAl  PATAGONIA 

fortune  in  Para,  but  we  had  reckoned  without  two  serious  drawbacks, 
— the  "rubber  crisis"  and  the  cHmate.  Rain,  rivers,  and  trade  winds 
unite  to  make  the  city  cooler  than  its  situation  warrants.  Death  by  sun- 
stroke is  unknown — in  all  Brazil,  for  that  matter — and  by  night  it  was 
at  times  almost  uncomfortably  cold.  But  the  rain  which  had  treated  us 
so  kindly  for  months  broke  all  known  records  during  our  engagement 
in  Belem.  It  was  during  a  raging  downpour  that  the  copper-tinted  half- 
owner  of  the  "Bar  Paraense"  and  I  drove  about  in  a  luxurious  taxicab 
paying  our  "duty  calls"  on  the  editors  of  the  six  or  eight  local  news- 
papers, and  it  was  in  a  continuation  of  the  same  deluge  that  we  opened 
that  evening,  taking  in  more  than  a  conto  merely  because  ours  was  a 
novelty  for  which  we  could  charge  double  admission.  We  remained 
cheerful,  however,  because  everyone  assured  us  that  every  three  days 
of  rain  were  sure  to  be  followed  by  three  dry  days.  For  that  matter, 
it  was  asserted  that  the  daily  shower  came  always  at  a  fixed  hour  in 
the  afternoon,  so  exactly  that  people  made  their  appointments  "before 
or  after  the  rain,"  without  troubling  to  refer  to  the  clock.  All  this  may 
be  true,  but  if  so,  ours  was  an  off  year.  If  there  was  any  one  thing 
we  could  not  be  certain  of,  it  was  whether  or  not  we  could  venture 
out  at  any  hour  of  the  day  or  night  without  risking  a  drenching,  and 
of  the  twelve  nights  we  played  in  Para  it  rained  continuously  and  in 
veritable  cataracts  exactly  a  dozen. 

Luckily,  all  Paraenses  are  not  afraid  of  water  or  we  shomd  have 
been  forced  to  close  our  doors.  The  people  themselves  at  length  ad- 
mitted that  they  had  never  seen  it  rain  so  incessantly  No  wonder 
paroaras  find  the  contrast  between  the  low,  heavy  skies,  of  Amazonia 
and  the  lofty,  brilliant  ones  of  Ceara  so  saddening;  even  we,  from  the 
often  wintry  North,  found  the  constant  downpour,  broken  only  by  mO' 
mentary  splotches  of  steaming  sunshine,  getting  on  our  nerves.  The 
trees  of  the  pragas  and  avenues  seemed  to  scrape  with  their  upper 
branches  the  swollen  black  clouds  which  marched  slowly  over  us  ih 
closed  squadrons  day  after  day. 

Nowhere  in  Brazil  did  the  iniquitous  "deadhead"  flourish  so  abun- 
dantly as  in  Para.  Two  boxes  and  a  row  of  orchestra  seats  of  the  "Bar 
Paraense"  belonged  to  the  brewery  which  furnished  the  liquid  refresh- 
ments; similar  accommodations  were  reserved  permanently  for  the 
families  of  the  empreza,  or  management ;  as  many  belonged  to  the  chief 
of  police — though  he  always  assigned  his  rights  to  friends,  and  forced 
his  way  in  with  as  many  as  he  chose  to  bring  with  him ;  every  "author- 
ity," municipal,  state,  and  federal,  from  the  president  to  the  most  lowly 


TAKING  EDISON  TO  THE  AMAZON  451 

clerk,  was  accustomed  to  walk  in  without  being  challenged ;  the  six 
moth-eaten  little  newspapers  were  given  a  dozen  seats  a  night,  and 
these  having  been  sold  or  given  away,  any  loafer  or  boy  who  chose  to 
state  that  he  was  a  newspaper-man  must  be  let  in,  under  penalty  of 
possible  scurrilous  attacks  in  the  next  edition ;  scores  of  unkempt  part- 
negroes  appeared  nightly  with  a  card  stating  they  were  detectives; 
insolent  half-African  policemen  in  uniform  not  only  forced  their  way 
in,  but  habitually  dragged  a  turmoil  of  friends  or  progeny  with  them; 
it  had  long  been  the  custom  to  count  the  average  Brazilian  family  of 
parents  and  six  children  as  three  adults,  tliough  each  child  expected 
to  occupy  a  full  seat ;  the  "artists,"  "advertisers  on  the  curtain,"  "electri- 
cal inspectors,"  "volunteer  firemen,"  and  what  not  who  expected  to 
get  in  on  one  excuse  or  another  were  without  number.  Every  Paraense 
of  any  African  ancestry  seemed  to  be  on  the  police  force,  even  the  chief 
being  distinctly  tar-brushed,  and  to  have  no  other  duty  than  to  attend 
Kinetophone  performances.  More  than  once  I  counted  forty  policemen 
in  uniform  in  an  audience  of  less  than  ten  times  that  number,  not  to 
mention  more  "authorities"  and  other  forms  of  grafters  than  I  could 
estimate.  Truly,  a  government  is  often  a  useless  as  well  as  an  expen- 
sive luxury.  Though  policemen  and  higher  officials  always  swarmed, 
we  never  got  a  suggestion  of  assistance  from  them.  One  night  a  crowd 
of  ridiculously  garbed  students  who  were  celebrating  the  reopening  of 
the  academy  after  the  six  months'  annual  vacation  forced  their  way 
in  some  forty  strong,  yet  not  one  of  the  hundred  official  "deadheads" 
in  the  house  raised  a  whisper.  On  another  occasion  I  had  the  doors 
closed  during  our  part  of  the  entertainment  in  order  that  the  audience 
should  not  be  disturbed  by  late-comers.  In  the  middle  of  a  number  the 
chief  of  police  arrived  and  demanded  that  he  and  a  group  of  friends  be 
admitted  at  once,  on  penalty  of  everyone  of  us  being  placed  under 
arrest.  There  was  the  same  staid  attitude  on  the  part  of  the  grafting 
politicians  from  the  palace  and  the  tiruhus  that  lazily  preen  their 
feathers  on  the  roof  of  it  after  a  rain — scenting  from  afar  any  chance 
of  gorging  themselves  and  circling  around  it  in  their  black  carrion- 
crowlike  garb,  pretending  whenever  they  are  observed  that  they  do 
not  wish  to  feed  and  strolling  nonchalantly  off,  only  to  hurry  back  as 
soon  as  they  are  free  from  observation. 

A  long  article  appeared  in  the  chief  Para  newspaper  one  morning 
"proving"  that  a  Brazilian  youth  invented  the  Kinetophone  in  1908! 
I  should  have  wired  Edison ;  he  would  have  been  astonished.  I  was 
not,  however,  for  I  had  read  even  more  amazing  things  in  Brazil.    Ac- 


452  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

cording  to  the  "Dictionary  of  Famous  Brazilians,"  a  Paraense  invented 
both  the  balloon  and  the  flying-machine — that  is,  he  got  as  far  as  Paris 
on  a  government  subvention  to  "perfect  his  great  invention"  and  had 
a  bully  time  among  the  grisettes,  though  he  never  rose  bodily  above  the 
ground.  The  same  work  of  many  volumes,  as  well  as  the  "History  of 
Parahj^ba"  taught  in  the  schools  of  that  state,  is  authority  for  the  state- 
ment that  the  typewriter  was  invented  by  a  Parahybano  priest  named 
Francisco  Joao  de  Azevedo.  As  he  was  already  editing  the  first  news- 
paper of  North  Brazil  in  1826,  the  typewriter  must  be  an  older  machine 
than  we  suspect.  "Blessed  be  he  who  bloweth  his  own  horn,  lest  it  be 
not  blown,"  said  Mark  Twain.  Nearly  every  state  of  Brazil  gets  out  an 
elaborate  volume,  resembling  our  high  school  or  college  annuals,  prais- 
ing itself  to  the  skies  and  including  pictures  not  only  of  its  many  more 
or  less  imaginary  industries,  but  portraits  of  all  its  "influential  citizens" 
— who  can  afford  it. 

The  "Estrada  de  Ferro  de  Braganga"  operates  a  16-mile  commuters' 
branch  out  along  the  shore  of  the  river-mouth  to  Pinheiro,  as  well  as  a 
main  line  of  more  than  a  hundred  miles  to  the  town  for  which  it  is 
named.  Though  it  is  state  property,  the  federal  government  imposes  a 
federal  tax  of  twenty  per  cent,  on  its  tickets,  and,  being  Brazilian,  its 
daily  train  starts  at  the  crack  of  dawn.  This  was  the  old  overland 
route  from  Sao  Luiz  to  its  offspring,  Para,  yet  the  train  made  rare  and 
short  stops,  for  there  was  little  but  endless  bush  and  genuine  tropical 
jungle  during  the  whole  nine  hours'  run.  Here  and  there  were  patches 
of  corn,  but  the  scattered  inhabitants  along  the  way  were  mainly  en- 
gaged in  the  production  of  children.  The  latter  were  habitually  stark 
naked ;  the  women  dressed  in  two  thin  cotton  garments  covering  them 
from  neck  to  bare  heels ;  men  naked  to  the  waist  lounged  in  huts  that 
were  mere  stick  skeletons  smeared  with  mud,  sometimes  slipping  on  a 
jacket,  without  buttoning  it,  when  they  came  outside.  Personally,  I 
prefer  the  frank  loin-cloth  of  the  East  Indian. 

In  Braganga  itself,  as  along  the  way,  the  scarcity  of  African,  and 
the  prevalence  of  Caucasian,  blood  was  surprising,  with  Indian  mix- 
tures in  considerable  evidence.  The  vigario,  or  parish  priest,  with 
whom  I  had  some  conversation  on  this  and  kindred  subjects,  asserted 
that  the  cahoclo,  or  part-Indian  native,  was  in  general  lazier  and  more 
worthless  than  the  negro  mixtures ;  but  this  I  had  found  by  no  means 
the  usual  Brazihan  opinion.  Everything  is  relative,  and  this  native  of 
sleepy  Parahyba  considered  the  people  of  Amazonia  "incredibly  in- 
dolent."   Braganca  boasts  as  well  as  shows  its  age,  having  won  the  title 


TAKING  EDISON  TO  THE  AMAZON  453 

of  lilla  a  centUF}'  ago.  There  are  electric-lights,  but  most  of  the  streets 
are  grass-grown  and  the  jungle  jostles  the  town  on  every  side.  It  was 
uncc  called  Souza  de  Caete,  from  the  river  in  which  it  washes  its  clothes 
and  along  which  fishermen  and  crabmen,  carrying  baskets  full  of 
squirming  carangrcijos,  plod  in  barefoot  contentment. 

A  hovel,  masquerading  as  the  "Pensao  da  Mulata,"  had  all  its  rooms 
occupied — several  times  each,  in  fact — but  was  sure  it  could  accommo- 
date me,  for  what  was  the  hanging  of  one  more  hammock?  The  place 
Avas  too  mulatto-ish  even  for  my  adventurous  taste,  however,  and  by 
appealing  to  the  station  agent  I  was  taken  to  a  shop  kept  by  a  Gallego 
and  his  Andalucian  wife,  who  furnished  food  and  hammock-hooks  to 
"persons  of  a  certain  class,"  into  which  I  evidently  fell,  for  I  got  a  room 
in  which  only  a  bed  was  lacking  and  was  served  a  tolerable  su])per.  My 
hosts  did  not  run  a  hotel,  they  explained,  because  to  do  so  they  would 
have  to  hang  out  a  sign  and  pay  a  heavy  government  license  and  tax. 
With  only  the  sides  of  my  heavy  Ceara  hammock  to  cover  me,  I  slept 
little  from  midnight  on  because  of  the  cold,  abetted  by  frequent  deluges, 
i'he  Gallego  had  given  many  solemn  promises  to  wake  me,  but  had 
shown  no  signs  of  carrying  them  out  up  to  the  time  I  was  dressed  and 
ready  to  push  off.  A  fine  pickle  I  should  have  been  in  had  I  missed 
the  only  train  for  four  days.  My  bill  having  been  paid  the  night  before, 
I  stepped  noiselessly  out  the  window  and  let  them  sleep  on,  hurrying 
through  the  fading  light  and  the  swampy  streets  to  the  station.  At 
least  there  was  the  satisfaction  of  knowing  that  I  would  never  have 
10  catch  another  Brazilian  train.  That  night,  after  a  mere  thirty-five 
hours'  absence,  I  found  my  shoes,  valise,  even  the  band  of  my  hat 
covered  with  green  mold  in  my  airy  room  at  the  "Cafe  da  Paz." 

The  end  of  m\  engagement  with  the  Kinetophone  was  nearer  than 
I  had  expected.  After  several  communications  to  the  man  who  held 
the  theatrical  monopoly  of  Manaos,  Vinhaes  had  at  last  received  a  cable 
in  code  which  we  deciphered  as  "Nous  refusons  toute  proposition." 
\ery  Parisian,  of  course,  and  definite  in  any  language.  The  fact  was, 
according  to  every  test  we  could  give  by  absent  treatment,  that  Manaos 
was  deader  than  Para.  The  latter  has  at  least  its  shipping  and  its  sup- 
plying of  the  interior,  but  the  exotic  city  of  the  Amazonian  wilderness 
depends  for  its  existence  almost  solely  on  rubber. 

The  rivalry  between  the  two  cities  of  the  Amazon  has  always  been 
acute,  and  Para  was  chuckling  with  tales  of  its  rival's  come-down  in  the 
world.  Manaos,  the  Paracuses  asserted,  always  copied  their  improve- 
ments, and  would  ruin  itself  rather  than  admit  it  was  not  Para's  equal 


454  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

When  Para  formed  a  zoo,  Manaos  immediately  followed  suit.  Then 
rubber  fell  and  the  zoo-keeper  came  to  the  state  minister  in  charge  and 
said,  "S'nho',  falta  comida  pa'  os  bichos.  "No  food  for  the  animals,  eh? 
Well,  I  tell  you  what  you  do.  Listen" — but  the  story  is  worth  the 
telling  only  in  the  language  of  the  scornful,  sarcastic  Paraenses — "Ollie, 
voce  mata  tal  bicJio  e  da  d  comer  aos  outros,  ouvioii."  "Sim,  s^nho','' 
replied  the  zoo-keeper,  and  he  went  away  and  killed  such  and  such  an 
animal  and  fed  it  to  the  others,  even  as  he  had  been  ordered.  A  day 
or  two  later  he  came  back  with  the  same  story,  and  went  home  to  apply 
the  same  solution.  This  was  repeated  for  weeks,  until  only  the  jaguar 
was  left.  The  minister  stared  at  the  zoo-keeper  for  a  long  time  when 
he  came  to  report  this  state  of  affairs,  and  scratched  his  head  in  per- 
plexity. Then,  a  brilliant  idea  suddenly  striking  him,  he  cried :  "Olhe, 
entdo  voce  solta  o  tal  onga!"  Whereupon  the  keeper  bowed  his  head 
and  went  back  to  turn  the  jaguar  loose,  even  as  the  minister  had  com- 
manded, and  thus  ended  the  Manaos  zoo.  That  of  Para  was  bidding 
fair  to  suffer  a  like,  if  more  humane  fate,  for  all  the  facetiousness  of 
the  Paraenses  at  the  expense  of  their  poverty-stricken  brethren  up  the 
river.  Two  years  now  the  ragged,  barefoot  employees  of  the  Para  zoo 
had  been  mainly  dependent  upon  the  charity  of  the  Austrian  women  in 
charge  of  it,  and  there  was  even  then  a  man  sitting  across  the  table 
from  us  who  had  come  down  to  carry  the  most  valuable  of  its  birds  and 
mammals  back  to  the  Bronx. 

April  2ist,  national  holiday  of  Brazil  in  honor  of  the  drawing  and 
quartering  of  Tiradentes,  is  now  doubly  famous  as  the  exact  date  on 
which  I  last  ran  a  Kinetophone  show.  I  have  said  that  it  rained  every 
night  during  our  Para  engagement,  but  that  afternoon  the  sun  beat 
down  with  equatorial  fury.  In  the  sheet-iron  booth  under  the  sheet- 
iron  roof  the  sweat  streamed  down  into  my  eyes  until  I  could  not  make 
out  the  projection  on  the  canvas,  and  the  crank  rubbed  the  skin  off  the 
inside  of  several  fingers.  That  night,  in  honor  of  the  occasion,  I  put 
on  a  "GREAT  DOUBLE  PROGRAM"  so  that  nearly  all  my  old  film- 
friends  came  out  upon  the  screen  to  do  their  turns  and  give  me  a  chance 
to  bid  them  farewell.  The  next  afternoon  "Tut"  and  I  went  out  and 
pulled  down  the  show,  and  the  travel-worn  trunks  disappeared  forever 
from  my  sight  as  they  were  rowed  out  to  the  Ceard,  now  on  her  return 
voyage.  Because  she  was  taking  with  her  also  the  state  senator  and  the 
archbishop  of  Para,  the  military  band  and  great  mobs  of  populares 
came  down  to  the  wharf,  giving  us  the  sensation  of  making  a  holiday 
of  our  parting  when  "Tut"  stepped  into  a  rowboat  and  slipped  away 


TAKING  EDISON  TO  THE  AMAZON  455 

into  the  humid  night  toward  the  port-holes   reflected  on  the  placid 
bosom  of  the  river. 

With  him  went  Vinhaes,  one  Brazilian  whom  I  had  found  strictl> 
honorable  in  all  his  dealings.  Naturally,  as  our  engagement  in  Para 
was  over,  the  rains  had  abruptly  ceased.  Turned  out  upon  the  world 
alone  again  for  the  first  time  since  I  had  joined  Linton  in  Rio  more 
than  eight  months  before,  I  wandered  idly  along  the  streets,  wondering 
what  on  earth  I  could  do  to  pass  the  evening.  Almost  unconsciously 
my  steps  carried  me  back  to  the  "Bar  Paraense,"  but  there  was  only  a 
pitiful  audience  of  twenty  or  so,  and  most  of  those  sat  in  the  second- 
class  seats  watching  an  inexcusable  mess  of  screen  rubbish.  I  took 
refuge  in  my  room  and  whiled  away  the  time  making  a  final  report  on 
our  tour.  Out  of  221  days,  we  had  played  196,  losing  the  rest  in 
traveling  or  holidays,  giving  40  matinees,  or  236  j^erformances  of  an 
average  of  nearly  three  sessions  each.  We  had  appeared  in  49  theaters 
in  29  towns  of  11  states,  and  had  failed  on  only  one  contract, — that  at 
Itajuba,  where  a  disrupted  railroad  had  forced  us  to  remain  an  extra 
day  in  Ouro  Fino.  Our  total  income  had  been  54,665,000  reis,  of  which 
my  own  share  had  been  6,882,000.  Though  it  was  months  later  before 
I  again  had  news  of  my  adventurous  ward,  the  Kinetophone  maintained 
its  high  American  reputation  to  the  end.  Beginning  in  Natal,  "Tut' 
not  only  fulfilled  all  the  contracts  I  had  arranged  for  his  return  trip 
but  carried  the  "eighth  marvel"  clear  down  to  Rio  Grande  do  Sul — a 
remarkable  feat  in  view  of  the  fact  that  he  made  the  rest  of  the  tour 
entirely  alone,  training  local  talent  in  each  town  to  put  on  and  take  off 
the  phonograph  records.  That  tour  de  force  made  me  wonder  if,  after 
all,  my  own  services  had  been  mainly  ornamental. 


CHAPTER  XIX 

UP   THE   AMAZON    TO   BRITISH    GUIANA 

IT  WOULD  have  been  foolish  to  have  sailed  directly  home  from 
Para,  now  that  there  remained  only  one  unexplored  corner  of 
South  America.  Besides,  it  w^as  fourteen  months  since  I  had  done 
any  real  wandering,  and  to  have  returned  at  once  to  civilization  from 
the  easy  experience  of  my  Kinetophone  days  might  have  left  me  with 
as  great  a  longing  for  the  untrodden  wilds  and  the  open  road  as  when 
I  had  set  out  three  and  a  half  years  before.  I  am  not  merely  one  of 
those  whose  chief  desire  in  life  is  to  go  somewhere  else,  but  I  have  a 
horror  of  going  by  the  ordinary  route.  There  was  one  way  home 
which  no  one  seemed  to  have  followed,  one  which  even  Brazilians  con- 
sidered impossible ;  and  the  fii  st  leg  of  that  journey  was  to  push  on  up 
the  Amazon  to  Manaos. 

On  the  morning  of  May  first,  therefore,  having  added  six  hundred 
grains  of  quinine  and  a  roll  of  cotton  bandages  to  my  equipment,  I 
boarded  a  gaiola,  or  "bird-cage,"  as  river  steamers  are  known  in  Ama- 
zonia, and  struck  south.  The  journey  could  have  been  made  direct  by 
ocean  liner  in  less  than  half  the  time,  and  these  flimsy  native  craft  not 
only  charge  the  same  fare,  but  sell  tickets  as  if  they  were  conferring  a 
special  and  individual  favor ;  but  they  v/ander  in  and  out  of  the  river 
byways  and  give  glimpses  of  Amazonian  life  which  passengers  on  the 
big  steamers  never  suspect.  The  Andird  was  perhaps  a  hundred  feet 
long,  its  two  decks  heaped  and  littered  with  boxes,  bales,  casks,  trunks, 
and  huge  glass  demijohns  incased  in  rattan,  until  one  could  barely 
squeeze  and  scramble  one's  way  along  them.  On  the  open  deck  aft 
stood  a  long  dining-table  flanked  by  wooden  benches,  while  ten  small, 
stuffy  four-berth  cabins  stretched  along  either  side  of  the  boat  close  to 
the  boilers.  These,  of  course,  were  merely  dressing-rooms  and  places 
to  stow  one's  baggage,  for  everyone  slept  on  deck.  After  a  very  Bra- 
zilian dinner,  with  the  big  jolly  captain,  of  pure  Portuguese  ancestry, 
at  the  head  of  the  table  in  the  family  manner,  there  was  a  scramble 
for  places  to  tie  hammocks,  and  the  space  ordinarily  allotted  being  all 

456 


UP  THE  AMAZON   TO   BRITISH   GUIANA  457 

too  small,  the  entire  after  deck,  cxcei>t  the  table  itself,  was  soon  fes- 
tooned with  a  network  of  redes  in  all  colors. 

"Todo  e  a  vontade,  soihorcs,"  said  the  captain,  "Aqui  nada  estd  p-ro- 
hibido.  A  casa  c  nossa ;  ncm  nma  saia  a  hurdo ;"  and  with  nothing  pro- 
iiibited  and  not  a  "skirt''  on  board  we  fell  quickly  into  [jajaraas  and 
slippers,  from  which  most  of  the  passengers  did  not  change  again  dur- 
ing the  trip.  Behind  us,  without  background,  I'ara  lay  Hat  across  her 
yellow  water,  only  her  reservoir  and  the  twin  towers  of  die  cathedral 
standing  a  bit  above  the  general  level,  ugly  with  ships  and  warehouses, 
in  the  foreground,  scores  of  the  vessels  rusting  away  because  rubber 
had  lost  its  spring.  Slowly  it  receded  to  a  line  on  the  horizon  dividing 
a  light-blue  from  a  light-yellow  infinity,  then  faded  away  into  nothing- 
ness. 

Even  this  smaller  mouth  of  the  river  was  very  wide.  The  main- 
land on  the  left  w^as  already  growing  indistinct,  yet  on  the  right  the 
Island  of  Marajo  was  only  a  distant  faint  line.  As  we  drew  nearer, 
this,  too,  seemed  covered  with  dense  forests  as  far  as  the  eye  could 
see,  with  many  slender  palms  which  I  took  to  be  the  carnauba,  though 
they  turned  out  to  be  the  bwity.  Toward  three  o'clock  we  put  in  at 
a  port  on  the  island,  a  bucolic,  peaceful  cove  with  a  cool-looking  two- 
story  farmhouse,  a  group  of  cleanly  white  women  and  children  gazing 
down  from  the  deep  shade  of  the  upper  veranda.  Men  in  pajamas 
and  wooden  tamuncos  wandered  down  to  the  boat,  from  which  we, 
similarly  clad,  strolled  ashore.  The  lower  story  of  the  house  was  a 
well-stocked  shop,  an  iron  gate  shutting  off  the  wide  stairway  to  the 
balcony  above,  where  the  women  and  children  lived  in  almost  Oriental 
seclusion.  Beside  it  stood  a  large  cac//ara-mill  grinding  up  sugar- 
cane and  turning  it  into  rum  in  25-liter  demijohns,  more  than  a  hun- 
dred of  which  were  already  on  the  wharf,  waiting  to  be  carried  aboard 
the  Andird.  A  group  of  reddish-gray  cattle  with  the  suggestion  of 
a  hump  were  grazing  in  the  grassy  yard  beyond  the  distillery. 

The  Island  of  Marajo.  several  times  larger  than  the  British  Isles, 
with  great  plains  stretching  from  horizon  to  horizon,  has  long  been 
famous  for  its  cattle.  Once  they  were  so  numerous  that  they  were 
killed  only  for  their  hides;  then  came  an  epidemic  which  nearly 
wiped  them  out.  Emperor  Dom  Pedro  took  a  hand,  made  the  island 
a  breeding-place,  improved  the  stunted  and  decreasing  native  stock 
by  tlie  importation  of  zebu  bulls,  and  now  the  island  was  estimated 
to  have  forty  thousand  head,  furnishing  meat  to  most  of  the  Amazon 
Valley.     The  zebu  in  his  heavy  hide,  with  its  black,  srn-proof  lining, 


458  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

not  only  endures  the  climate  easily,  but  is  indifferent  to  the  carra- 
patos,  or  ticks,  and  all  the  other  insect  plagues  to  which  animals  from 
the  temperate  zone  are  subject;  he  eats  any  food,  crosses  with  any 
species  of  cattle,  bequeathing  all  his  good  qualities  with  even  a  fraction 
of  his  blood,  furnishes  both  meat  and  milk  of  a  fairly  high  grade, 
and  as  a  draft-animal  is  noted  for  his  strength  and  endurance.  The 
only  great  plaga  left  were  the  alligators,  which  every  year  kill  much 
stock.  When  the  waters  are  low  the  cowboys  of  Marajo  have  "bees" 
of  driving  alligators  into  shallow  places,  where  they  are  dragged  out 
by  the  tail,  unless  they  succeed  in  clinging  to  one  another  until  the 
hunters'  strength  is  exhausted,  and  killed  with  axes.  Water-buffaloes 
were  also  once  introduced,  but  they  proved  inferior  and  did  not  breed 
well  with  cows.  The  pet  of  this  particular  estate  was  a  magnificent 
zebu  bull  that  had  come  from  India  by  way  of  England  and  Rio,  at 
a  cost  of  more  than  $6,000,  and  which  strolled  about  with  the  same 
dignified  regal  tread  of  the  sacred  bulls  of  I*uri  and  Benares  to  whom 
he  was  closely  related.  He  ate  anything,  according  to  the  fazendeiro 
— sugarcane,  ntelgago,  or  crushed  pulp,  bread,  farinha,  soap,  hats, 
clothing,  shoes — but,  continued  his  fond  owner,  he  had  a  lordly  way 
of  choosing  only  the  best,  which  again  carried  my  mind  back  to  long 
rows  of  East  Indian  shopkeepers  shivering  with  apprehension  lest 
one  of  the  holy  animals  wandering  past  discover  their  most  cherished 
wares. 

The  estate-owner  was  in  close  touch  with  the  world  and  its  doings 
and  had  traveled  widely  in  Europe,  though  not  in  Brazil.  I  could 
scarcely  maintain  a  seemly  countenance  when  he  told  me  in  great 
detail,  with  much  eloquence  and  wealth  of  gestures,  the  story  of 
Edison,  almost  word  for  word  as  I  had  written  it  a  few  days  before 
for  the  chief  daily  of  Para.  But  gradually  the  conversation  turned 
to  politics,  as  it  usually  does  when  men  meet  in  Brazil,  unless  religion 
happens  to  get  the  right  of  way.  His  heartfelt  remarks  about  "this 
calamity  of  a  government"  showed  that  he  and  his  like  were  as  fully 
aware  of  the  knavery  of  their  politicians  as  any  foreign  observer ; 
the  trouble  was,  being  talkers  rather  than  doers,  they  had  no  notion 
where  to  begin  in  an  effort  to  improve  things. 

At  the  first  symptoms  of  night  we  pushed  on  up  the  reddish-yellow 
river.  I  had  already  made  it  a  practice  to  give  myself  an  occasional 
hour  of  exercise  on  the  slightly  curving  roof  of  the  steamer,  and  as 
there  was  but  slight  room  for  walking,  I  indulged  in  a  modified 
form  of  calisthenics,  to  the  unbounded  astonishment  of  my  fellow- 


UP  THE  AMAZON   TO   BRITISH   GUIANA  459 

passengers.  The  Brazilians  not  only  did  not  exercise,  except  wiih 
their  tongues ;  they  did  not  even  read,  though  there  were  excellent 
electric-lights  over  the  hammocks.  Even  the  most  nearly  educated 
among  them  start  out  on  a  trip  of  a  month  or  more  on  one  of  these 
(jaiolas  without  a  page  of  reading  matter.  While  they  were  wonder- 
ing amusedly  at  my  exercising  I  could  not  hut  ask  myself  what  on 
earth  they  did  with  their  minds  during  those  weeks  of  forced  inaction. 
They  seemed  to  endure  the  voyage  in  a  sort  of  coma,  sleeping  audibly 
!)y  day  in  their  hammocks,  though  often  making  the  whole  night 
hideous  with  their  card  games. 

We  stopped  during  the  dark  hours  at  a  couple  of  fazendas  to  pick 
up  sealed  demijohns,  and  in  the  morning,  a  brilliant  Sunday,  entered 
the  Strait  of  Breves.  This  is  a  narrow  and  deep  section  of  the  river 
between  Marajo  and  the  mainland,  with  endless  dense  forests,  some- 
times not  more  than  five  hundred  yards  away,  on  either  side,  so 
winding  that  often  the  exit  was  apparently  closed  ahead  and  one 
was  at  a  loss  to  know  how  the  boat  could  proceed.  The  stream  was 
so  placid  that  the  metallic  reflections  were  almost  painful  to  the  eyes, 
and  so  clear  that  the  virgin  forest,  from  its  slender  little  palm-trees 
to  its  liana-wound  giants,  seemed  to  stand  upright,  in  reversed  posi- 
tions, above  and  below  the  surface,  with  not  a  suggestion  of  land 
visible.  Tucked  away  here  and  there  in  the  edge  of  the  water-rooted 
wilderness  was  a  single  house  or  hut  built  of  jungle  materials  and 
standing  on  stilts,  with  no  apparent  soil,  but  only  board-walks  above 
the  water.  The  dwellings  were  generally  new  and  fairly  clean,  as 
were  the  inhabitants  in  their  newly-washed  Sunday  clothes,  at  least 
from  a  distance.  Now  and  then  a  compact  little  island  dense  with 
forest  jungle,  lordly  palms,  and  majestic  trees  with  great  buttresses, 
slipped  past.  Natives  in  their  uhds,  long,  slender,  dugout  canoes 
sitting  low  in  the  water,  glided  along  the  roots  of  the  forest,  often 
all  but  swamped  in  our  wake,  but  always  saving  themselves  by  skilful 
canoemanship.  Women  and  children  were  equally  water-birds  and 
drove  the  steed  of  the  Amazon  as  fearlessly  and  unerringly  as  the 
men.  They  sat  tailor-fashion  on  the  very  nose  of  t!ie  canoe,  now  and 
then  crossing  the  stream,  plying  their  round  or  heart-shaped  paddles — 
on  some  of  which  were  painted  fantastic  faces — in  a  languid  yet  ener- 
getic manner,  appearing  always  on  the  point  of  falling  ofT,  though  to 
go  overboard  anywhere  in  the  Amazon  is  to  risk  being  devoured  by 
alligators,  parainhas,  and  a  dozen  other  bichos.  Woods,  trees,  uhds, 
houses,  even  the  women  combing  their  hair   inside   them — for  they 


46o  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

generally  had  no  walls — showed  exactly  as  plainly  below  the  water  as 
above,  colors  and  all,  so  absolutely  mirror-smooth  was  the  constantly 
curving  strait.  No  doubt  after  twenty-five  years  in  an  Amazonian 
pilot-house,  as  was  the  case  of  our  captain,  all  this  would  become  deadly 
monotonous — the  endless,  dark-green,  impenetrable  forest  unrolling 
like  a  stage  setting  on  either  side  day  after  day  and  year  after  year, 
to  doomsday  and  the  end  of  time — but  at  least  the  first  trip  on  a  bril- 
liant day  is  a  memory  not  easily  lost. 

It  is  natural  to  see  only  a  dreary  sameness  in  the  endless  film  un- 
rolling at  a  steady  ten-mile  pace  on  either  hand,  but  in  reality  the 
differences  are  infinite,  the  countless  tree- forms  alone  the  study  of  a 
lifetime.  The  uninitiated  may  journey  for  hours  in  these  Amazonian 
wildernesses  without  detecting  a  sign  of  animal  life  where  every 
square  yard  has  its  sharp-eyed  denizens.  Though  food  abounds  every- 
where, the  unschooled  may  starve  in  the  midst  of  plenty,  as  the  moss- 
covered  bonds  and  rotting  bones  of  more  than  one  escaped  prisoner 
from  the  rubber-fields  have  borne  witness.  Most  astonishing  of  all, 
perhaps,  to  the  newcomer  is  the  apparent  absence  of  bird  life — unless 
there  still  lingers  in  his  mind's  eye  that  terrifying  picture  of  our 
school-day  geographies — a  rope  of  monkeys  swinging  from  a  lofty 
branch,  the  lowermost  playfully  tickling  an  alligator  under  the  chin. 

Early  in  the  afternoon  we  slid  up  to  an  empty  sheet-iron  barracao, 
and  then  wandered  on  again,  the  only  reason  for  the  stop  evidently 
being  that  the  captain  wished  to  buy  a  native  straw  hat,  especially 
well  made  in  this  region.  The  only  ones  on  hand  were  too  small  for 
him,  so  he  ordered  one  for  the  down-trip  some  two  months  later.  As 
long  as  the  boat  was  moving  we  were  perfectly  comfortable.  In  my 
steamer-chair  under  the  prow-awning  I  watched  life  slip  lazily  past, 
forgetting  even  that  I  was  suffering  for  lack  of  exercise.  In  the 
tropics  a  man  seems  to  have  as  much  energy  as  elsewhere;  but  he  is 
prone  to  form  plans  and  when  the  time  comes  to  execute  them  to  say 
to  himself,  "Oh,  I  think  I  '11  loaf  here  in  the  shade  another  half 
hour,"  and  before  he  is  aware  of  it  another  wasted  day  is  charged 
up  opposite  his  meager  credit  column  with  Father  Time.  Whenever 
we  halted  in  a  windless  corner  of  the  river  to  take  on  demijohns  or 
leave  a  few  of  the  things  which  civilization  exchanges  for  them,  the 
heat  was  intense.  One  was  often  reminded  of  the  fact  that  Para 
is  nearer  New  York  than  it  is  to  Rio,  for  most  of  the  supplies  of  this 
Amazonian  region  seemed  to  come  from  "America,"  as  its  inhabitants 
call  the  United  States.    The  people  of  the  Amazon  Valley,  for  instance, 


UP  THE   AMAZON   TO   BRITISH   GUIANA  461 

where  cows  are  few  and  generally  tuberculous  and  children  the  one 
unfailing  crop,  consume  great  quantities  of  American  condensed 
milk.  W'c  signed  a  "vale"  for  a  milreis  whenever  we  wanted  milk 
wilh  our  morning  coffee,  and  were  handed  a  small  can  of  a  ver) 
familiar  brand.  Too  lazy  even  to  filter  water  through  a  cloth,  we 
drank  the  native  yellow-brown  Amazon,  containing  everything  from 
mere  silt  to  tiny  "jacares"  (alligators),  as  the  Brazilians  called  them. 
Passengers,  crew  and  riverside  inhabitants  were  equally  easy-going 
and  contented  with  life.  Neither  the  captain  nor  his  immediato,  a 
pleasing,  well-mannered  man  of  Portuguese  father  and  Indian  mother, 
thought  it  necessary  to  assume  that  fierce  outward  dameanor  with 
which  Anglo-Saxon  commanders  so  often  seek  to  maintain  authority. 
Ours  was  a  family,  a  sort  of  patriarchal  rule  which,  in  the  end,  seemed 
to  bring  as  effectual  results  as  when  nothing  is  left  to  individual 
judgment. 

Pinson  went  twenty  leagues  up  the  Amazon  before  he  discovered 
that  he  had  left  the  ocean,  if  we  are  to  believe  old  chroniclers.  It  is 
indeed  the  "sea-river"  or  the  "fresh  sea,"  as  the  Brazilians  call  it,  for 
in  most  places  it  broadens  out  until  the  endless  tree-line  takes  on  the 
wavering  blue  of  great  distance.  Day  after  day  the  pageant  of  mag- 
nificent trees  of  many  species,  their  trunks  often  totally  hidden  by  the 
dense  smaller  growth  and  the  lianas  that  draped  them  as  with  winding 
sheets,  crawled  ceaselessly  northward,  though  at  times  it  receded  to  the 
dim  horizon.  Rain  and  dull  skies  seemed  to  have  remained  behind  in 
Para,  yet  there  was  a  vapid  breath  to  this  prolific  creation,  a  super- 
abundant luxuriance  about  us,  which  made  the  daily  consumption  of 
quinine  seem  a  wise  and  foresighted  precaution.  Even  in  the  hush- 
ing heat  of  noonday  one  seemed  to  feel  fever  ramping  up  and  down 
the  land,  throttling  man  even  as  the  vines  and  fungi  sapped  and 
choked  the  mammoth  trees ;  by  night,  when  the  vampires  winged  their 
velvety  flight  in  and  out  of  the  shaded  depths  from  which  came  the 
incessant  night  sounds  of  the  tropics,  mingled  now  and  then  with  the 
gentle  murmur  of  the  great  river,  it  was  as  if  Death  himself  were 
striding  to  and  fro  questing  for  victims. 

On  the  third  or  fourth  day  we  caught  glimpses  of  low,  wooded 
hills,  or  ridges,  and  as  these  always  give  footing  for  castanlias  along 
the  Amazon,  we  were  not  surprised  soon  after  to  come  upon  sheet- 
iron  warehouses  and  huge  heaps  of  "Brazil  nuts."  The  "Para  chestnut" 
grows  on  a  tree  averaging  more  than  a  hundred  feet  in  height — so 
high  that  it  is  never  climbed  for  its  fruit — and  clustering  fairly  well 


462  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

together  on  slight  tablelands  on  both  sides  of  the  Amazon.  The  nuts 
ripen  during  the  rainy  season,  from  January  to  March,  and  fall  to 
the  ground  by  hundreds.  In  its  native  state  the  "nigger-toe"  is  about 
the  size  and  shape  of  a  husked  cocoanut,  but  with  a  shell  so  hard  that 
a  loaded  cart  passing  over  it  will  not  crack  it.  Strangely  enough, 
monkeys  have  a  way  of  breaking  them  open,  as  they  have  of  picking 
them  from  the  branches;  but  puny  and  uninventive  man,  at  least  of 
the  Amazonian  variety,  not  only  waits  until  the  nut  falls  of  itself, 
but  requires  the  aid  of  tools  to  open  it.  Broken  with  an  ax  or  a 
hammer,  each  shell  yields  from  twenty  to  thirty  nuts  set  tightly  to- 
gether like  the  segments  of  an  orange.  A  man  of  experience  and 
average  industry  can  harvest  about  three  bushels  of  "Brazil  nuts"  in 
a  day.  Many  Amazonian  families  make  a  journey  to  the  castauhaes, 
or  "chestnut-groves,"  their  annual  pdndego,  or  "blow-out,"  and 
though  many  die  every  year  of  an  intermittent  fever  called  sezoes, 
and  immorality  is  rampant,  whole  villages,  men,  women,  and  children, 
take  to  the  hills  to  camp  out  during  the  "chestnut"  season,  on  the  pro- 
ceeds of  which  the  survivors  frequently  live  the  rest  of  the  year. 
Caboclos  in  palm-leaf  hat,  cotton  trousers,  and  a  piece  of  shirt,  were 
even  then  arriving  at  the  warehouses  with  canoes  level  full  of  the 
nuts,  an  empty  basket  set  down  into  them  to  give  room  for  the  paddler's 
bare  feet.  Paddle  and  shovel  are  the  same  word  in  Portuguese  (pa). 
and  to  these  dwellers  on  the  Amazon  the  same  implement  serves  both 
purposes,  for  with  the  flat  round  paddle  they  shovel  the  nuts  into 
the  basket  when  they  have  reached  their  destination.  The  basketful 
is  then  dipped  into  the  river  and  sloshed  about  until  the  worthless 
nuts,  being  lighter,  float  away,  and  the  rest,  well  washed,  are  piled 
in  heaps  in  the  warehouse.  Here  they  were  worth  about  20$  a  hundred 
kilograms,  at  war-time  rate  of  exchange  less  than  five  cents  a  quart. 
Wholesalers  buy  them  from  the  warehouse-keepers,  and  at  least 
four  fifths  of  them  go  to  the  United  States.  At  home  they  are  not 
dry  and  sweet,  as  in  the  North,  but  taste  not  unlike  a  damp,  sweetish 
acorn,  and  native  consumption  is  not  so  great  as  might  be  expected. 
One  afternoon  the  captain  came  back  on  board  with  a  sapucaia, 
a  larger  and  better  kind  of  "Brazil  nut"  than  the  one  we  know.  These 
are  rarer  than  the  castanha  and  grow  on  a  more  bushy  and  shady 
tree  than  the  tall,  graceful,  arm-waving  castanheiro.  Unlike  the  fa- 
miliar species,  this  one  must  be  planted,  the  nut  being  merely  thrown 
on  top  of  the  ground  near  water ;  and  the  fruit  should  be  picked,  for  if 
tlie  nuts  fall  out  while  the  shell  is  still  on  the  tree,  that  limb  will  not 


UP  THE  AMAZON  TO   BRITISH   GUIANA  4^j3 

produce  again  for  years.  All  this  extra  work,  added  to  its  scarcity, 
makes  the  sapucaia  unknown  in  foreign  lands,  though  at  home  it 
sells  for  several  times  as  much  as  the  common  variety.  The  shell  is 
about  the  size  of  a  squasli,  rather  uneven  and  angular  in  shape,  with  a 
tampa,  or  tight-fitting  sort  of  trapdoor  in  the  bottom,  which  opens 
when  the  nuts  are  rij)e  and  lets  them  fall  to  the  ground.  In  each  shell 
there  are  thirty  to  fifty  nuts,  larger  than  the  ordinary  "Brazil  nut"  and 
shaped  like  fresh  dates.  Inexperienced  visitors  to  Amazonia  often 
mistake  the  castanha  de  nmcaco,  or  "monkey  chestnut,"  for  the  real 
article,  though  it  grows  on  the  trunk  rather  than  the  branches  and 
has  no  edible  qualities. 

Once,  soon  after  midnight,  we  took  on  board  at  Parainha  a  white 
woman  with  a  long  stairway  of  children,  yellow  and  sun-bleached 
country  gawks,  the  eyes  of  all  of  them  running  with  open  sores  of 
what  was  probably  trachoma.  They  were  going  up  the  Jurua  to  the 
end  of  the  Andird's  run,  near  the  Bolivian  border,  to  begin  life  anew. 
The  woman's  husband,  a  Portuguese,  had  for  years  been  manager  of 
a  large  seringal,  or  rubber-field,  which  he  had  made  a  very  paying 
concern  for  the  owner,  who  lived  in  Para,  Rio,  and  Paris.  Foolishly, 
the  Portuguese,  either  ignorant  of  or  unattentive  to  Amazonian  condi- 
tions, had  let  his  wages  drift  without  drawing  them,  until  he  had  more 
than  twelve  contos  to  his  credit.  Then  one  day  some  workers  on  the 
seringal  came  to  the  house  and  said,  in  the  matter-of-fact  tone  of  the 
Amazon  wilderness,  "We  are  going  to  kill  you."  The  manager  asked 
permission  to  send  away  his  wife  and  children  first,  but  the  assassins 
did  not  think  it  worth  the  trouble,  so  they  shot  him  where  he  stood, 
with  his  family  clustered  about  him.  Not  one  of  my  fellow-passengers 
seemed  to  have  the  least  doubt  that  the  owner  had  instigated  the  murder, 
in  order  to  get  out  of  paying  the  back  salary.  "Perhaps  he  had  gambled 
himself  into  debt,  or  had  nothing  more  to  spend  on  his  French  mis- 
tress," they  languidly  explained.  The  papers  of  Para  had  reported 
the  case  and  it  was  perfectly  well  established,  yet  justice  is  so  un- 
known up  the  Amazon  that  no  one  had  been  arrested  and  the  widow 
and  orphans  had  finally  been  driven  off  the  seringal  by  the  owner  him- 
self, who  had  paid  part  of  their  fare  up  the  river  to  be  rid  of  them. 
He  continued  to  live  as  usual,  witli  a  new  manager,  for  such  things 
are  so  common  along  the  Amazon  that  no  one  appeared  to  think  twice 
about  it,  any  more  than  of  a  man  dying  of  fever  or  snake-bite.  To 
each  new  group  of  passengers,  or  to  anyone  who  showed  interest  in 
hearing  it,  the  woman  repeated  the  story  over  and  over  in  exactly  the 


464  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

same  words  and  gestures,  after  the  manner  of  people  of  sluggish 
intelligence,  like  a  piece  she  had  learned  for  public  recital,  all  in  the 
same  monotonous  tone  in  which  she  might  have  spoken  of  the  failure  of 
the  mandioca  crop.  She  was  of  too  primitive  a  type  to  have  been  able 
to  decorate  the  story.  Some  one  had  advanced  the  equivalent  of  nearly 
a  thousand  dollars  to  get  the  family  up  the  river,  where,  no  doubt, 
they  are  still  working  it  out  as  virtual  slaves  to  some  other  tyrant  in 
Brazil's  national  territory  of  Acre. 

A  contrasting  type  was  our  seringueiro,  or  owner  of  a  rubber-field 
far  up  in  the  interior.  He  wore  a  goatee  and  mustache,  cotton  trousers 
and  undershirt,  the  latter  always  open  and  disclosing  his  caveman 
chest;  and  he  was  almost  childlike  in  his  gaiety,  with  constant  jokes  and 
puns,  whether  winning  or  losing  at  cards.  Yet  beneath  it  all  one 
could  see  that  he  was  full  of  tropical  superstitions  and  above  all  of  the 
lust  for  money, — or,  more  exactly,  the  lusts  which  money  will  satisfy, 
for  the  Brazihan  is  rarely  a  miser — and  that  he  would  rob,  or  hold 
in  slavery,  or  assassinate  by  his  own  hand  or  another's,  far  up  there 
in  the  unruled  wilderness  where  he  was  going,  not  only  without  com- 
punction, but  almost  without  realizing  that  he  was  doing  anything 
amiss. 

At  times  the  river  opened  out  like  a  vast  sea,  and  one  wondered 
not  how  we  were  to  get  through,  but  how  we  were  to  find  our  way. 
All  the  jungle  trees  had  v/et  feet,  and  every  now  and  then  pieces  of 
forest  or  patches  of  bushy  wilderness  came  floating  down  the  river, 
though  I  could  make  out  none  of  the  gihoyas  (boas),  deadly  serpents, 
or  jaguars  of  popular  fiction  riding  upon  them.  Sometimes,  in  the 
refulgent  western  sun,  the  procession  of  trees  took  on  a  sort  of  early- 
autumn  tinge,  as  if  winter  were  leaving  its  accustomed  track  and  was 
about  to  spread  its  blighting  trail  across  this  ocean  of  vegetation.  A 
fine  day,  like  a  great  man,  dies  a  glorious  death ;  a  rainy  one  slumps 
off  from  dullness  to  darkness,  you  know  not  when  nor  care,  like 
the  invalid  grouch  or  the  malefactor,  and  on  the  whole  you  are  glad 
that  he  is  gone  and  that  night  has  come.  Yet  there  was  a  certain  lack 
of  color  in  Amazonian  sunsets.  It  was  as  if  nature  had  so  many  ma- 
terials at  her  disposal  that  she  was  careless  in  the  use  of  them.  One 
evening  a  big  ocean  liner,  gleaming  with  lights,  slowly  overhauled  us 
and  pushed  on  into  the  darkness  beyond.  Gnats  similar  to  those  that  had 
made  life  miserable  during  my  tramp  across  tropical  Bolivia,  and  here 
called  puims,  gave  us  occasional  annoyance,  though  by  no  means  as 
much  as  two  "Turks"  deeply  marked  with  long  Amazon  residence. 


UP  THE  AMAZON  TO   BRITISH   GUIANA  465 

who  persistently  kept  the  most  liorrible  of  American  phonographs 
squawking  far  into  the  night.  My  chair  and  hammock  were  forward, 
however,  where  it  sometimes  grew  so  cold  in  the  wind  that  I  had  to 
wrap  the  sides  of  my  heavy  Ceara  hammock  about  me. 

On  such  a  cool,  black  night  we  halted  at  the  old  city  of  Santarem 
at  the  mouth  of  the  Tapajoz  after  midnight,  so  that  no  one  went 
ashore.  In  the  mornmg  we  crossed  the  river  and  entered  first  the 
Parana  and  then  the  igarape  of  Alcnquer.  A  parana,  in  Amazonian 
parlance,  is  a  narrow  arm  or  branch  of  a  river  which  comes  back  into 
it  again;  an  igarape  is  a  Ijlind  tributary,  pond,  pool,  or  lake.  Here  the 
narrow  stream  ran  between  unbroken  avenues  of  trees,  among  which 
one  with  an  almost  snow-white  leaf  was  conspicuous.  Rarely  was 
there  a  bluff  or  high  bank,  but  for  the  most  part  a  deadly  flatness, 
often  with  a  reedy  swamp  in  front  and  densest  jungle-forest  behind. 
Ocean  liners  go  direct  from  Santarem  to  Obidos  and  never  see  this 
igarape.  We  slid  almost  into  the  dooryards  of  brown,  half-naked  fam- 
ilies in  the  scarce  mud  huts  along  the  flooded  way,  startling  them 
as  we  might  have  Adam  and  Eve  about  the  time  of  the  apple  episode, 
and  at  ten  in  the  morning  went  ashore  in  Alenquer,  a  typical  small 
town  of  Amazonia. 

There  were  perhaps  a  hundred  buildings  clustered  together  on  a 
bank  of  the  narrow  branch,  everything  as  deadly  still  as  only  barefoot, 
grass-grown  towns  can  be,  though  the  place  was  cleaner  and  more 
comfortable  than  one  would  have  expected  up  a  little  side-arm  of 
the  Amazon  in  the  sweltering  wilderness.  It  carried  the  mind  back 
to  Santa  Cruz  de  la  Sierra  in  the  lowlands  of  Bolivia ;  there  was  the 
same  forest  of  cane  chairs  and  settees  in  the  wide-open  houses,  tlie 
same  hammocks  tied  in  knots  on  the  walls  and  soon  to  be  spread  again 
for  the  siesta,  the  same  atrocious  pictures  in  hideous  frames,  the 
same  garden-like  patios  behind.  Here,  perhaps,  there  were  more 
signs  of  comparative  wealth,  though  far  more  leaning  on  the  elbows 
than  work.  The  country  roundabout  was  partly  flooded  and  the 
greenest  of  green,  with  some  low,  wooded  ridges  in  the  near  back- 
ground.   Cacao  grows  wild  in  the  forest  about  Alenquer. 

I  came  upon  an  unusually  good  school  building  for  a  town  of 
this  size  and  situation,  with  more  signs  of  energy  than  in  the  cooler 
but  more  negro  parts  of  the  country.  Almost  all  the  children  had 
more  or  less  color,  but  it  was  more  apt  to  be  of  Indian  than  of 
African  origin.  School  "kept"  from  8  to  1 1  :30,  with  none  in  the 
afternoon,  "and  even  from  ten  on  we  get  little  done  in  this  climate," 


466  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

according  to  the  principal.  His  assistants  were  all  women,  rather 
weak  and  unintelligent  looking  for  the  most  part,  all  with  some  Indian 
blood.  This  was  a  state  school  with  no  municipal  income,  and  "teach- 
ers are  required  to  be  graduates  of  the  normal  in  Para,  but  we  are 
rarely  able  to  get  any,  so  we  have  to  substitute."  The  principal  him- 
self was  the  only  one  who  fulfilled  the  legal  requirements.  The  fact 
that  salaries  had  kept  dropping,  until  now  they  were  less  than  half 
<.he  350$  a  month  they  had  been  two  years  before  when  rubber  was 
high,  with  lower  exchange  and  higher  prices,  and  that  no  one  con- 
nected with  the  school  had  been  paid  anything  in  twenty-eight  months, 
may  have  had  something  to  do  with  the  lack  of  candidates.  The 
teachers  made  arrangements  with  the  fathers  of  families  to  keep  body 
and  soul  together.  Women  and  men  received  the  same  pay — when 
there  was  any — "naturally,"  said  the  principal,  "seeing  they  have  to 
do  the  same  work."  As  in  all  Latin-America,  the  teaching  was  mere 
tutoring,  crude  and  primitive  compared  with  the  imported  American 
furniture.  Boys  and  girls  sat  in  separate  rooms,  and  the  entire  room- 
ful rose  in  unison  and  gave  the  military  salute  when  a  visitor  entered. 
Otherwise  there  was  the  usual  Latin-American  lack  of  order  and 
attention  and  nothing  could  induce  the  teachers  to  resume  their  task 
as  long  as  the  visitor  remained.  The  summer  vacation  was  from 
November  i  to  January  15,  but  the  principal  complained  that  a  large 
proportion  of  the  pupils  were  even  then  away,  for  many  whole  families 
migrate  to  the  castanhaes  from  February  to  April  or  May  to  pick 
up  "Brazil  nuts,"  and  the  school  fi!ls  up  again  only  in  June  or  July. 
There  is  a  state  law  requiring  the  attendance  of  boys  from  six  to 
fifteen  and  girls  from  six  to  twelve ;  but  law  in  Brazil,  sighed  the 
principal,  is  "largely  made  to  laugh,"  except  those  parts  of  it  that 
bring  income  to  politicians,  which  are  sternly  enforced.  Compulsory 
attendance  of  female  pupils  was  set  low  because  girls  on  the  Amazon 
marry  early.  Mothers  of  twelve  or  thirteen  are  so  common  as  scarcely 
to  attract  attention.  Among  our  passengers  was  a  bright  young  den- 
tist from  Ceara  who  had  been  born  on  his  mother's  twelfth  birthday. 
He  had  fifteen  brothers  and  sisters,  all  living,  and  his  mother,  according 
to  his  statements  and  the  photograph  he  carried,  was  a  comely  woman 
of  thirty-two  in  the  prime  of  life,  without  a  sign  of  wrinkles  or 
graying  hair.  In  the  interior  of  the  Island  of  Marajo  girls  often  re- 
main naked  until  puberty,  the  time  of  marriage,  and  there  are  many 
jokes  on  the  awkwardness  of  brides  in  their  first  clothes. 

The  captain  had  spent  his  boyhood  in  Alenquer,  so  we  tarried  some 


UP  THE  AMAZON   TO   BRITISH   GUIANA  A^y 

two  hours  while  he  visited  and  had  dinner  with  relatives  and  old 
friends.  The  "Amazon  River  Steam  Navigation  Company,"  to  which 
the  Andird  belonged,  was  a  British  concern,  with  a  federal  and  state 
subsidy  and  a  generally  tangled  ownership  and  management;  but  the 
captain  had  none  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  vice  of  punctuality.  Toward 
sunset  that  evening  we  stopped  at  a  huge  pile  of  cord-wood  partly 
under  water,  in  front  of  a  jazcnda  house  on  stilts  to  be  reached  only 
in  boats,  where  we  could  have  paddled  right  into  the  thatched  servants' 
quarters.  But  the  smallest  boy  or  girl  along  the  Amazon  can  handle 
a  canoe  with  an  ease  and  grace  suggesting  that  the  inontana  has  a 
mind  and  a  will  of  its  own;  and  no  one  ever  thinks  of  walking,  even 
to  the  next-door  neighbor's.  In  "summer"  and  non-flood  time  life  is 
said  to  be  pleasant  on  the  broad,  open  campos  which  were  now 
reedy  swamps.  We  remained  several  hours,  while  the  negro-ca^ot/o 
crew  of  half  a  dozen  carried  the  wood-pile  aboard  on  their  shoulders. 
P>efore  the  war  these  gaiolas  usually  burned  coal,  but  that  had  risen 
m  price  to  the  height  of  a  luxury.  Some  of  the  time  it  rained  in 
torrents ;  the  sky  was  heavy  and  dark,  and  it  grew  distinctly  chilly  even 
in  this  sheltered  corner.  The  last  sticks  of  wood  were  left  in  a  hurry 
and  with  a  whoop  when  a  fine  jararaca  of  the  deadly  white-tailed 
variety  was  found  sleeping  under  them. 

About  dawn  we  emerged  from  the  parand  upon  the  "sea-river" 
again,  with  a  horizon  so  broad  that  w-e  could  not  make  out  its  dirty- 
yellow  end  in  some  directions.  That  afternoon,  or  the  next,  we 
halted  before  the  house,  its  yard  flooded  and  backed  by  dense  humid 
cacao-woods,  of  two  energetic  young  Portuguese.  They  were  cour- 
teous fellows,  though  knowing  well  how  to  drive  a  bargain,  and  had 
considerable  education,  as  do  many  settlers  along  the  Amazon,  where 
"doutores"  in  eyeglasses  are  often  found.  The  ambitious  often 
come  here  to  risk  death  and  work  for  a  quick  fortune,  while  the  more 
languid  drift  through  life  in  their  safer  birthplaces.  I  tramped  for 
an  hour  in  the  damp,  singing  silence  and  heavy  shade  of  the  cacaoaes, 
everywhere  damp  underfoot  and  fetid  with  decay.  The  cacao-pod. 
about  six  inches  long  and  half  as  m.any  across,  grows  on  the  trunks 
and  lower  branches  of  its  bushy  dwarf  tree,  with  a  very  short  stem. 
Slashed  open,  the  pod  yields  about  sixty  seeds,  which  are  put  into  a 
long  tube  of  woven  palm-leaf,  like  that  used  by  the  Indians  to  squeeze 
the  poison  out  of  the  mandioca,  which  is  suspended  and  compressed 
by  a  weight  attached  to  the  end  until  all  the  pulp  turns  into  vinho  de 
cacao,  a  white  liquid   not  unpleasant  to  the  taste  and  so  harmless 


468  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

ihat  it  might  be  sold  even  in  our  own  model  land.  Then  the  seeds  are 
laid  out  to  dry  a  week  or  two  in  the  sun  before  being  shipped  to 
Para,  and  on  to  New  York,  where  they  are  toasted  and  ground  for 
our  cocoa  and  chocolate.  The  Portuguese  brothers  sold  us  two  huge 
turtles  for  our  ship's  larder,  as  well  as  five  pigs  and  ten  chickens  to  be 
resold  higher  up  the  river ;  but  luckily,  negotiations  to  buy  some  cattle 
for  the  Manaos  market  fell  through  for  that  trip.  There  were  said  to 
be  unlimited  "Brazil  nuts"  in  this  region,  but  it  was  so  nearly  sure 
death  from  fever  to  spend  a  week  in  the  castanhaes  that  they  were 
never  gathered.  Death  is  a  most  commonplace  and  unexciting  visitor 
all  along  the  Amazon.  A  friend  comes  on  board,  and  in  the  course  of 
a  conversation  with  the  captain  or  some  other  old  acquaintance  says 
casually,  "Oh,  by  the  way,  my  brother  Joao  died  last  Thursday.  Do 
you  think  the  cacao  harvest  will  be  as  large  this  year?"  It  is  the  same 
with  the  loss  of  time.  Speaking  with  a  yawn  of  some  place  far  up  the 
river,  the  Amazon  traveler  says  idly,  as  he  shuffles  his  cards,  "Num 
mez  'stou  Id — ou  dois — In  a  month  I  '11  be  there — or  two." 

It  was  eleven  that  night  when  we  anchored  before  Obidos,  where  the 
Amazon  crowds  itself  four  hundred  meters  deep  between  banks  only 
a  mile  apart,  one  of  the  few  places  in  which  one  shore  can  be  seen 
from  the  other.  The  captain  promised  to  give  me  a  warning  whistle, 
so  I  went  ashore.  It  was  a  checkerboard  town  of  considerable  size, 
built  up  the  slope  of  a  ridge,  and  now,  at  midnight,  a  splendid  example 
of  what  a  city  of  the  dead  would  be, — the  wide  streets  deep  in  grass, 
the  houses  tight-closed,  for  the  Brazilians  are  deathly  afraid  of  air,  even 
in  this  climate,  and  not  a  sight  or  sound  of  a  human  being  in  all  my 
walk  about  the  town.  Horses,  cows,  and  donkeys  were  grazing  in  the 
streets  and  on  the  big  grassy  praga,  however,  thereby  outwitting  the 
blazing  daytime  sun;  but  they  were  so  silent  that  I  ran  squarely  into 
them  in  the  jet-black,  comfortably  cool  night,  its  dead  silence  broken 
only  by  the  creaking  of  a  few  tropical  crickets. 

I  was  awakened  toward  dawn  as  we  drew  up  before  a  ranch -house 
and  a  cattle-pen  in  a  narrow  creek.  Here  we  wasted  some  time  until 
daylight,  and  then  began  loading  fat  young  cattle  by  the  crude  and  cruel 
Amazonian  method  of  lassooing  and  dragging  them  into  the  water,  then 
hoisting  them  up  the  side  of  the  iron  hull  by  the  winch  ar_d  the  rope 
about  their  horns,  with  many  bumps  and  scratches  and  much  bellowing 
and  eye-straining  on  the  part  of  the  helpless  brutes.  All  this  meant 
nothing  to  the  natives,  however,  being  all  in  the  day's  job,  as  was  the 
packing  away  tightly  together  of  the  cattle  on  the  deadly  slippery,  iron 


UP  THE  AMAZON  TO   BRITISH   GUIANA  46CJ 

lower  deck,  where  the  sun  poured  in  mercilessly  a  large  part  of  the  day 
and  wiiere  the  animals  would  stand  as  best  they  could,  probably  without 
food  or  water,  for  the  four  or  five  days  left  to  Manaos.  They  cost  an 
average  of  ioOv$  a  head  here,  and  would  sell  for  nearly  three  times  that 
at  their  destination.  Slowly  and  leisurely  all  this  went  on,  as  if  we  had 
all  the  rest  of  our  lives  to  spend  on  the  Amazon,  and  it  was  sun-blazing 
ten  o'clock  before  we  pulled  our  mud-hook.  There  were  countless  float- 
ing islands  now,  and  big  patches  of  coarse,  light-green  grass  on  their 
way  to  the  distant  Atlantic.  All  day  we  slipped  along,  usually  with  a 
dugout  canoe  or  some  other  species  of  montaria  creeping  along  the  ex- 
treme lower  edge  of  the  forest ;  now  a  family  gliding  easily  down  to 
their  stilt-legged  home,  again  boatmen  bound  for  the  rubber-fields  pad- 
dling desperately  against  the  powerful  current,  as  they  had  for  weeks 
past  and  would  for  a  month  or  more  to  come,  beneath  these  same  heavy 
gray  skies.  These  Amazon  watermen  have  a  means  of  keeping  dry  that 
is  simplicity  itself  and  which  might  be  recommended,  with  reservations, 
in  the  North, — they  all  carry  a  small  bag  made  of  native  rubber,  and 
when  it  comes  on  to  rain  they  pull  off  their  clothes  and  put  them  in  the 
bag! 

The  greatest  product  of  the  Amazon  itself  is  the  pirarucii,  a  mammoth 
species  of  cod  that  dies  in  salt  water,  which  sometimes  attains  ten  feet 
in  length,  and  has  no  teeth,  but  a  bony,  rasp-like  tongue.  It  is  harpooned 
in  much  the  same  way,  on  a  smaller  scale,  as  the  whale,  and  is  a  game 
fighter,  more  than  one  expert  Amazon  fisherman  having  been  known  to 
make  a  pirarucii  tow  him  and  his  canoe  home.  It  is  the  chief  food  of  the 
Amazon  Valley  and  immense  quantities  are  dried,  salted,  and  shipped 
from  Para,  looking  like  boxed  sticks  of  brown  cord-wood  and  not  unlike 
that  in  taste.  Pirarucii  and  farinJia  d'agoa  make  up  most  Amazonian 
meals,  as  they  did  on  board  the  .Indira.  We  landed  boxes  of  this  staff 
of  life  even  at  towns  where  the  pirarucii  abounds,  the  lazy  inhabitants 
preferring  to  get  it  from  Para  to  catching  and  salting  it  themselves. 
The  largest  fish  of  the  Amazon,  but  much  less  common,  is  the  pcixc-boi. 
or  cow-fish.  This  is  said  to  grow  as  large  as  a  yearling  calf,  is  caught 
with  harpoons  and  killed  by  driving  stakes  into  its  nostrils,  yielding  a 
white  meat  not  unlike  pork  in  taste. 

We  sailed  out  upon  the  vast  river  again  and  took  four  hours  to  cross 
it,  stopping  at  the  village  of  Jurity  to  leave  a  mailhag  and  dragging  easily 
on.  Now  and  then  a  cloth  was  waved  from  some  ranch  along  the  river, 
the  boat  whistled,  and  faintly  to  our  ears  was  borne  the  shout  of  a  man. 
"Ha  uyn  passagciro  para  Ma}iaos!"    The  cai)tain.  who  seemed  to  know 


470  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

everyone  on  the  river  by  his  first  name,  made  a  trumpet  of  his  hands 
and  shouted  back,  "O,  Manoel!  Na  volta  dc  Faro,  ouvistesf"  And 
that  nis^ht  we  did  pick  him  up  on  our  return  from  Faro  up  the  Yamunda. 
One  day  the  talk  on  board  ran  to  garzas,  the  bird  that  furnishes  what 
we  know  as  aigrets.  A  native  passenger,  once  engaged  in  gathering  them, 
said  that  it  took  about  seven  hundred  birds  to  give  a  kilogram  of  feathers, 
even  of  the  larger  and  ch.eaper  size.  They  grow  only  along  the  back 
and  tail,  and  a  kilogram  of  the  largest  feathers  would  number  about  a 
thousand,  the  smaller  and  more  valuable  ones,  of  course,  in  proportion, 
and  would  sell  for  i$5oo  a  gram  in  Alanaos.  In  other  words,  a  pound 
of  ordinary  aigrets  would  bring  the  gatherer  about  a  hundred  dollars  at 
the  normal  exchange,  and  small  ones  as  much  as  twice  that  sum.  Time 
was  when  a  kilogram  of  small  feathers  sold  for  five  contos,  say  $i,6oo, 
"but  for  some  reason  we  do  not  understand  the  demand  in  the  United 
States  has  ceased,"  said  the  former  hunter  of  garzas,  "giving  the  market 
a  great  slump."  I  explained  the  reason  for  this,  and  after  musing  for 
some  time  he  admitted  that  it  was  rather  a  good  law,  not  because  he 
lecog-nized  any  cruelty  to  the  birds,  but  because  in  time  the  species 
would  become  extinct  and  another  means  of  livelihood  be  cut  off.  He 
claimed,  however,  and  was  supported  by  others  on  board,  that  it  is  not 
necessary  to  kill  the  birds.  He  knew  a  man  who  had  a  big  garsal  with 
thousands  of  them,  and  guards  to  see  that  no  one  killed  any,  and  every 
morning  he  went  out  and  picked  up  the  drooped  feathers,  getting  some 
eight  kilograms  a  year,  and  from  year  to  year,  too,  instead  of  only  once. 
He  made  it  a  rule  to  shoot  anyone  he  found  on  his  property  with  an 
aigret  in  his  possession.  Then  there  was  a  Spaniard  who  had  devised 
a  system  of  putting  the  birds  into  a  heater  at  night,  where  several 
feathers  loosened  enough  to  be  pulled  out  in  the  morning.  Dealers, 
however,  I  recalled,  thought  little  of  "dead"  aigrets  and,  as  in  the  case 
of  diamonds,  the  whims  of  pretty  woman  force  man  to  the  roughest  of 
exertions  to  supply  her  demands,  for  real  ^ra rxra-hunting  is  no  child's 
play.  This  man  had  known  an  American  living  in  Obidos  who  used 
tf)  have  himself  rowed  far  up  to  the  source  of  this  or  that  tributary 
(.A  the  Amazon,  and  then  paddled  down  alone,  arriving  sometimes  half 
a  year  later  with  eight  or  ten  kilograms  of  feathers,  but  half  dead  from 
his  struggle  with  the  jungle.  We  frequently  saw  some  of  the  birds  in 
question  from  the  decks  of  the  Andird,  tall,  slender,  graceful,  and 
generally  snow-white,  though  there  are  species  in  other  colors.  A  house 
dealing  in  aigrets  has  to  pay  the  State  of  Para  a  license  fee  of  5,500$  a 
year,  and  ten  per  cent,  ad  valorem,  while  the  municipio  collects  6$  an 


UP  THE   AMAZON   TO   BRITISH   GUIANA  471 

uunce  for  all  feathers  taken  within  its  confines — which  are  generally 
elastic.  "So,"  concluded  the  ex-aigret-hunter.  "as  usual  the  politicians 
skim  off  most  of  the  cream." 

On  the  morning  of  May  7  we  drew  up  near  a  grass  hut,  flying  the 
ugly  green  and  yellow  flag  of  Brazil  and  standing  ahove  the  waler  on 
stilts.  This,  according  to  the  captain,  corroborated  by  several  passengers, 
had  cost  the  taxpayers  twenty-five  contos — with  free  material  close  at 
hand,  and  labor  low  in  price,  the  actual  cost  of  the  building  was  probably 
not  one  fortieth  that  amount.  From  it  a  fiscal  of  the  State  of  Para  came 
on  board  to  see  what  we  were  carrying  out  of  the  state,  all  of  which 
must  pay  export  duty,  for  we  had  reached  the  boundary  line  between  the 
two  immense  states  of  Grao-Para  and  Amazonas,  including  nearly  half 
the  territor}^  of  mammoth  Brazil.  It  was  near  here,  at  the  mouth  of  the 
Yamunda,  that  Francisco  Orellano  claimed  he  was  attacked  by  amazons, 
thereby  giving  its  present  name  to  the  river  of  which  his  trickery  and 
bad  fellowship  made  him  the  discoverer.  "Proravclniente  estaba  com  0 
miolo  mollc"  (He  probably  was  with  the  brain  soft),  said  one  of  the 
passengers  ;  but  seeing  how  the  Indian  women  of  the  Amazon  basin  work 
on  a  basis  of  complete  equality  with  the  men  suggests  that  perhaps  there 
was  something  besides  an  equatorial  sun  and  a  troubled  conscience  to 
make  the  treacherous  Spaniard  fancy  he  had  been  pursued  by  female 
warriors.  When  he  came  back  from  Spain  to  conquer  his  great  river  he 
could  not  find  it,  but  lost  himself  up  a  branch  of  the  Tocantins. 

That  afternoon  we  w^ent  ashore  in  Parantins,  first  city  in  Amazonas, 
so  that  at  last  I  had  seen  everyone  of  the  twenty  states  of  Brazil,  and 
only  the  national  territory  of  Acre,  once  a  part  of  Bolivia,  remained. 
The  city,  just  a  little  patch  of  red-tiled  roofs  in  the  endless  stretch  of 
forest,  stands  on  a  bit  of  knoll  jutting  out  into  the  Amazon,  here  spread- 
ing away  five  miles  or  more  to  a  flat,  wooded,  faintly  discerned  shore  and 
to  the  east  and  west  running  off  over  vast  horizons  on  which  ships  dis- 
appear "hull-down,"  as  at  sea.  Its  slight  elevation  makes  Parantins 
breezy,  though  out  of  the  breeze  it  is  melting  hot.  I  dropped  in  upon 
several  caboclo  families  and  found  them  instantly  friendly,  though  shy 
and  modest,  frank  without  knowing  the  meaning  of  that  word,  most  of 
all  content  to  drift  through  life  swinging  languidly  in  a  hammock  and 
gazing  with  dreamy  eyes  out  across  the  broad,  sun-bathed  Amazon. 
The  houses  had  no  particular  furniture,  except  the  hammocks,  swung 
or  tied  in  a  bundle  on  the  mud  walls,  according  to  die  hour,  though 
almost  all  contained  a  little  hand-run  American  sewing-machine.  One 
house  without  a  chair  had  two  of  these,  and  all  had  the  crude  lace-pil- 


472  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

low  on  which  the  women  of  North  Brazil  while  away  their  time  making 
lace  with  a  great  rattling  of  birros. 

Bounded  on  four  sides  by  the  ways  of  bygone  generations,  the  people 
of  these  contented  Amazonian  villages  have  little  more  than  an  idle 
curiosity  in  the  ways  of  the  great  outside  world.  Seeing  nature  about 
them  produce  so  abinidantly  and  without  apparent  effort,  it  is  small 
wonder  they  are  hopelessly  lazy  from  our  northern  point  of  view. 
Sometimes  the  thought  comes  even  to  the  indefatigable  American  that 
perhaps  the  secret  of  life  after  all  is  this  contented  waiting  to  be  over- 
taken by  manana,  rather  than  a  constant  striving  to  outstrip  the  future. 
Yet  how  the  whole  world,  even  these  most  distant  little  back-waters,  has 
changed  in  the  first  two  decades  of  the  present  century,  with  its  per- 
sistent flooding  of  commerce  and  invention!  All  this  makes  life  more 
convenient,  perhaps,  but  it  gives  the  world  a  deadly  monotony,  as  if  one 
sat  down  everywhere  to  the  same  trite  moving-pictures,  killing  anything 
national  and  characteristic  by  imported  imitations  from  the  world's 
centers,  vastly  increasing  the  price,  while  greatly  lowering  the  value, 
of  living,  destroying  the  excellence  of  local  native  production,  taking 
away  its  incentive,  and  making  the  vocation  of  traveler  a  drab,  unin- 
spiring calling,  enormously  descended  since  the  glorious  days  of  Marco 
Polo,  or  even  of  Richard  Burton. 

We  passed,  with  much  whistling  and  individual  greetings,  another 
gaiola  of  our  line,  the  Indio  do  Brazil,  so  named,  strangely  enough,  not 
for  the  aborigines  in  general,  but  for  a  former  senator  from  the  State  of 
Para,  of  whom  this  was  the  family  name.  I  had  just  rolled  into  my 
hammock  when  we  stopped  going  forward  and  took  to  hunting  about  in 
the  dark,  silent  night  for  another  wood-pile.  The  river  was  still  and 
smooth  as  glass ;  the  light  of  a  house  on  the  shore-edge  showed  the  faces 
of  a  numerous  white  family  peering  out  upon  us,  but  it  was  so  dark 
that  we  slipped  back  and  forth  and  frittered  away  much  time  before  we 
located  the  wood-pile  and  tied  up  before  it.  The  owner  came  on  board 
to  gossip  as  long  as  the  ship  remained,  a  chance  not  to  be  lost  in  these 
isolated  regions,  and  the  constant  chatter,  added  to  the  customary  up- 
roar on  board,  made  .sleep  out  of  the  question  until  we  were  off  again. 
There  were  always  new  excuses  for  wasting  our — or  at  least  my — time. 
Early  in  the  afternoon  we  put  out  of  the  sea-broad  river  into  a  param 
as  straight  and  narrow  as  the  Suez  Canal  and  suddenly  anchored  in  the 
weeds,  a  thousand  miles  from  nowhere,  to  cut  grass  for  the  cattle! 

In  the  sunset  of  May  8  dwellings  grew  more  numerous  in  the  dense 
vegetation  along  shore,  and  at  dusk  the  prettiest  fazrnda  we  had  yet 


UP  THE  AMAZON   TO   BRITISH   GUIANA  473 

seen  loomed  up  on  a  fine  grassy  plateau  dotted  with  magnificent  trees, 
the  haystack  mango  and  the  imperial  palm  most  conspicuous  among 
them.  The  buildings  were  comfortable  and  roomy;  there  was  a  big 
barn  for  the  cattle,  which  the  natives  aboard  did  not  know  were  ever 
housed,  and  an  unusual  air  of  comfort  and  intelligent  cultivation.  1 
was  not  surprised,  therefore,  to  find  it  had  all  been  built  by  an  American, 
one  of  the  many  Southerners  who  came  down  after  the  Civil  War  and 
settled  along  the  Amazon.  At  the  age  of  sixty  he  had  shot  himself, 
rumor  having  it  that  he  had  grown  despondent  because  his  children  by  a 
Brazilian  wife  were  growing  up  as  worthless  as  the  natives.  His 
estate  was  on  the  edge  of  Itacoatiara,  last  of  the  four  principal  ports 
on  the  way  from  Para  to  Manaos,  where  we  went  ashore  while  the 
captain  visited  more  relatives  and  where  most  of  the  unusually  white 
population  stood  on  the  bank  above  to  greet  all  who  landed.  Here  we 
received  many  more  passengers,  among  them  a  group  of  prisoners  down 
on  the  lower  deck  with  the  cattle.  The  captives  had  been  sent  here  from 
Manaos  to  be  tried,  but  were  now  being  sent  back  because  the  judge, 
a  life  appointee,  but  of  what  was  now  "the  opposition,"  had  not  had  his 
pay  for  a  year  and  claimed  in  the  current  number  of  the  local  sheet, 
which  was  almost  entirely  taken  up  with  his  case,  that  he  "had  neither 
clodies  nor  shoes  necessary  to  uphold  the  dignity  of  appearing  in  public 
in  such  a  high  position."  As  a  matter  of  fact,  he  was  well  known  to  be 
a  man  of  independent  wealth,  but  this  was  an  approved  Brazilian  way 
of  "getting  back  at"  his  political  enemies.  The  prisoners  were  so  mixed 
up  with  the  other  deck  passengers,  in  hammocks  and  on  the  bare  deck, 
smoking  and  sleeping  among  the  freight,  pigs,  cows,  turtles,  sheep,  and 
the  soldiers  sent  to  guard  them,  similarly  dressed  in  undergarments  and 
the  remnants  of  trousers,  that  they  were  indistinguishable.  I  went  down 
with  the  officer  in  charge,  who  could  not  tell  which  were  prisoners  and 
which  were  soldiers  or  deck  passengers.  He  found  one  of  his  soldiers 
among  the  rubbish  and  told  him  to  go  and  point  out  the  prisoners  for 
my  benefit ;  but  even  the  soldier  could  not  tell  them  all,  and  after  a  long 
search  one  was  still  missing.  The  officer  put  his  toe  against  one  fellow 
lying  prone  on  the  deck  and  asked,  "Are  you  one  of  the  presos?" 
"jVao  s'nho' ''  the  man  replied,  crawling  to  his  feet,  "I  am  one  of  the 
soldier  guards."  We  had  about  given  up  finding  the  missing  men  when 
a  fellow  lolling  most  comfortably  in  a  hammock,  smoking  a  cigarette, 
spoke  up  with  obliging  and  cheery  friendliness,  "I  'm  one  of  them, 
capitao,"  at  the  same  time  tapping  himself  proudly  on  the  hairy  chest 
showing  through  his  open  undershirt. 


474  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

The  night  was  so  dense  black — nights  on  the  Amazon  always  seem  to 
be  jet  black,  even  when  the  sky  is  clear  and  the  stars  are  out  in  myriads 
— that  the  pilot  could  not  find  the  river  and  finally  ran  crashing  squarely 
into  the  forest- jungle,  where  it  was  decided  to  anchor  until  daybreak. 
It  turned  so  chilly  on  the  prow,  even  though  I  was  considerably  dressed 
and  covered  with  the  thick  sides  of  my  hammock,  that  I  took  to  shiver- 
ing as  if  my  old  Andean  fever  had  overtaken  me  again.  Heavy  rain 
poured  all  the  morning,  turning  the  world  an  ugly  gray  and  so  cold  it 
was  hard  to  believe  we  were  almost  on  the  equator.  These  bitter  cold 
spells  are  common  along  the  Amazon.  In  mid-morning  we  thrust  our 
nose  into  a  farmyard  again  and  changed  from  a  ship  to  a  grass-cutting 
machine.  The  rain  continued  in  an  unbroken  deluge,  and  early  in  the 
afternoon  we  came  out  of  a  par  and  upon  the  Amazon  proper,  so  broad 
we  could  not  see  across  it  and  differing  from  the  ocean  only  in  color. 
The  rain  decreased,  but  the  chill  continued,  and  at  three  o'clock  we 
reached  the  mouth  of  the  Rio  Negro  and  left  the  Amazon  behind. 
For  there  onward  the  main  stream  of  what  the  aborigines  called  the 
Maranhao,  and  which  I  had  seen  rise  high  up  on  the  Peruvian  plateau,  is 
known  as  the  Solimoes  from  where  it  enters  Brazil  at  Tabatinga.  The 
two  rivers,  both  of  immense  width  at  this  point,  joined  but  for  some 
time  did  not  mingle  together,  the  yellow  of  the  Amazon  remaining  per- 
fectly distinct  from  the  "black"  of  the  Negro,  as  black  as  any  deep, 
clear  water  without  a  blue  sky  to  reflect  can  be.  Here  and  there  patches 
of  the  two  waters  mixed  and  for  a  long  time  flowed  northward  per- 
fectly distinct  in  color,  then,  like  the  population,  united  to  form  the 
nondescript  hue  of  the  main  stream. 

More  and  more  huts  and  houses  appeared  along  the  shore,  a  bluff  of 
dark-reddish  soil,  as  the  few  scratches  showed,  the  rest  being  virgin 
forest  flooded  up  to  the  lower  branches  of  the  trees.  The  hut  of  many 
a  poor  caboclo  was  inundated,  and  some  were  standing  disconsolately 
ankle-deep  in  the  water,  holding  the  baby  in  their  arms.  Others  had  let 
go  the  solid  earth  altogether  and,  thrusting  a  few  logs  in  raft  form 
under  their  huts,  floated  ofif  comfortably  as  you  please,  swinging  as 
domestically  and  calmly  in  their  hammocks  as  if  they  were  lodged  in  the 
"Cafe  da  Paz,"  their  few  possessions  on  crude  shelves  above  them  and 
only  the  black,  fathomless  river  and  a  few  logs  laid  far  apart  for  floor. 
Huts,  generally  on  stilts,  became  almost  continuous,  all,  for  some  reason, 
built  out  over  the  water  instead  of  up  on  the  top  of  the  bluff  out  of  the 
wet — if  it  were  possible  to  get  out  of  the  wet  in  such  a  climate.  But 
the  cabi  clos  of  the  Amazon  pay  little  attention  to  rain,  water  being  their 


UP  THE   AMAZON   TO   BRITISH   GUIANA  475 

native  element,  and  many  now  appeared,  male  and  female,  paddlin;^ 
homeward  at  the  same  calm,  even  pace  in  the  downpour  as  in  the  finest 
of  weather.  Farther  on  a  few  huts  had  broad  dirt  steps  cut  up  the  face 
of  the  bluff  from  the  water's  edge.  Then  dimly  across  the  black  sea 
there  began  to  paint  itself  a  faint  line  of  ships  at  anchor,  with  gaps  in 
it,  like  an  army  just  after  a  machine-gun  attack.  As  we  drew  nearer, 
the  chacaras  and  "summer-houses"  of  rich  Mauaocnses  appeared, 
nicely  arranged  along  the  top  of  the  bluff  where  they  could  escape  from 
the  dreadful  urban  rush  of  Manaos.  Then  gradually,  out  of  the  un- 
broken wilderness  ahead,  a  modern  city  began  to  appear  around  a 
densely  wooded  point,  finally  disclosing  itself  in  its  entirety  through  the 
wet  atmosphere.  Piled  up  on  a  low  knoll  and  part  of  another,  looking, 
already  as  complete  as  many  an  old  European  city,  the  yellow-blue  dome 
of  the  imposing  state  theater  bulking  above  all  else  except  the  brick 
tower  of  the  cathedral,  Manaos  was  utterly  exotic  in  this  Amazonian 
wilderness ;  it  was  like  coming  upon  a  great  medieval  castle  in  mid- 
ocean. 

Our  rubber-estate  owner  from  the  Acre,  who  had  lived  in  an  open 
undershirt  all  the  way  from  Para,  suddenly  appeared  on  deck  re- 
splendent in  a  white  suit  wdth  broad  silk  lapels,  a  gay  silk  waistcoat  with 
six  American  $2.50  gold-pieces  as  buttons,  a  diamond  scarf-pin  re- 
sembling a  lighthouse,  and  four  diamond  rings  on  his  fingers.  We 
swung  in  toward  the  big  Manaos  brewery — looking  not  unlike  the  Wool- 
worth  building  through  this  hazy  humidity — in  its  hollow  between  the 
two  knolls,  and  at  length  tied  up  to  one  of  the  many  buoys,  each 
marked  with  the  cost  of  its  rental  per  day,  floating  half  a  mile  or  more 
out  from  the  city.  For  though  we  might  have  anchored  in  an  ocean 
port,  the  Rio  Negro  averages  forty-five  fathoms  in  depth  directly  od 
the  wharves.  From  these  several  boatloads  of  officials  soon  put  out, 
followed  by  boatmen,  baggage-carriers,  and  hotel  runners  with  the  first 
news  of  the  outside  world  we  had  heard  in  ten  days.  There  were  as 
many  formalities  as  if  we  had  arrived  direct  from  Europe,  both  the  port 
doctor  and  the  customs  officers  having  to  be  satisfied  l^efore  any  of  the 
rowboats,  of  which  there  were  at  least  three  for  every  passenger  landing 
and  which  without  exception  were  manned  by  European  white  men, 
could  approach  the  gangway.  I  embraced  the  captain,  the  immcdi<ito. 
and  a  few  fellow-passengers — male  only — and  bade  them  contentment,  if 
not  speed,  on  the  much  longer  journey  still  ahead  of  them. 

Manaos,  a  thousand  miles  up  the  Amazon  and  nine  above  the  mouth 
o{  the  Rio  Negro,  though  only  twenty  meters  above  sea-level,  is  a  real 


476  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

city  more  than  half  a  century  old.  By  reason  of  some  peculiar  lay  of 
the  land  it  is  less  troubled  with  rain,  and  in  consequence  is  less  sloppy, 
than  Para.  The  chief  objection  to  the  place  during  my  first  two  days 
there  was  that  it  was  so  cold;  after  that  it  was  nearly  always  brilliant 
with  a  slashing  sun  and  humid  heat  that  seemed  to  multiply  through  the 
hot  thicknesses  of  the  night,  until  for  the  first  time  I  was  conscious  of 
feeling  my  energy  in  any  way  curtailed  by  the  climate.  Great  heat  and 
constant  humidity  producing  a  vegetation  so  prolific  that  man  cannot 
hold  his  own  against  nature,  Manaos  was  not  only  jostled  on  all  sides  by 
the  impudent  jungle,  but  right  in  town  there  were  many  patches  of 
rampant  wilderness  and  immense  beautiful  trees  that  seemed  to  be 
forces  of  occupation  from  the  surrounding  forests.  Much  split  up 
by  hollows,  it  had  igarapes,  or  tropical  creeks,  so  covered  with  fresh- 
green  water-plants,  often  in  blossom,  that  one  could  not  tell  them  from 
solid  ground,  while  many  a  swamp  musical  with  bullfrogs,  and  in- 
numerable mosquito  incubators,  were  within  a  short  stroll  of  the 
European  center  of  town.  Manaos  has  fewer  unpaved  streets  than 
its  rival  at  the  mouth  of  the  river,  and  being  on  rolling  ground,  while 
Para  is  flat,  it  boasts  a  few  more  scenic  beauties ;  but  the  visitor  con- 
stantly has  the  sensation  of  watching  an  unequal  fight  between  the 
exotic  city  and  the  mighty  wilderness  that  surrounds  it. 

Time  was  when  Manaos  was  much  more  of  a  city.  The  high  price 
of  rubber  had  perhaps  forever  gone,  and  the  "Rubber  City"  gave  signs 
of  disappearing  again  into  the  jungle  from  which  it  had  risen.  As  the 
Italian  proprietor  of  the  "Rotisserie  Sportsman"  I  sometimes  patron- 
ized said  weepingly,  *T  would  have  done  much  better  to  have  gone  to 
hell  than  to  have  come  to  Manaos."  Every  down  boat  for  months  had 
been  crowded  to  utmost  capacity  with  passengers  of  all  classes  and 
origins  fleeing  the  poverty  that  had  settled  upon  Amazonia.  So  swift 
had  been  the  depopulation  that  I  could  much  more  easily  have  rented 
a  large  house  than  a  single  furnished  room;  so  scarce  were 
"distinguished  foreigners"  that  the  arrival  of  a  stranger  attracted  as 
much  attention  as  in  a  village,  and  I  might  myself  have  called  on  the 
governor  of  the  largest  state  of  Brazil,  had  I  brought  with  me  the 
heavy  black  costume  of  formality  which  a  local  editor  was  so  astonished 
to  find  me  traveling  without.  Yet  news  of  this  ebbing  tide  did  not  seem 
to  have  spread  far.  The  booming  of  a  certain  section  of  the  world  is 
like  setting  a  heavy  body  in  motion — once  it  has  gained  momentum  it 
is  hard  to  stop — and  a  considerable  number  of  immigrants  were  still 
coming  to  Manaos  expecting  to  make  a  quick  fortune  because  a  de- 


UP  THE   AMAZON  TO   BRITISH   GUIANA  47? 

scription  of  it  in  ''boom  clays"  years  before  had  at  last  reached  their 
local  papers.  Even  when  these  hopeful  fortune  seekers  met  returning 
victims,  they  often  refused  to  believe  them,  taking  their  pessimism  to 
be  canny  competition,  and  persisted  in  pushing  on  to  be  disillusioned  in 
person. 

Yet  it  still  had  all  the  outward  concomitants  of  a  real  city.  For  al- 
most the  first  time  in  Brazil  1  had  my  clothes  washed  properly,  and  in 
hot  water.  John  Chinaman,  virtually  unknown  in  the  rest  of  the  re- 
public, did  it.  Even  the  chief  places  of  amusement  for  money-oozing 
rubber-gatherers  were  still  open,  though  the  more  aristocratic  of  the  in- 
mates had  gone  back  to  France  or  sought  more  promising  pastures, 
leaving  the  field  to  stolid,  vulgar,  Polish  and  Russian  Jewesses.  As  in 
all  Brazil,  there  was  no  attemi)t  to  bolster  up  waning  commerce  by  sell- 
ing better  things  more  cheaply ;  on  the  contrary,  the  rare  victim  was  ex- 
pected to  make  up  for  the  absence  of  his  fellows.  Restaurants  and 
hotels  habitually  made  one  thousand  to  fifteen  hundred  per  cent,  profit 
on  their  food.  A  kilogram  of  beef  cost  a  milrcis  in  the  market,  or 
even  less  after  the  day  warmed;  and  this  was  cut  into  from  ten  to 
fifteen  so-called  beefsteaks  that  sold  as  high  as  two  milreis  each  in  the 
restaurants,  even  of  workingmen.  In  the  market  three  oranges  cost 
I  GO  reis  ;  on  the  restaurant  table  across  the  street  one  cost  five  times  that ; 
a  mamao  selling  for  300  reis  was  cut  into  five  or  six  pieces  at  500  each. 
H)Jt  the  Brazilians,  too  indolent  or  too  proud  to  go  into  the  restaurant 
business  themselves,  continued  as  usual  "fazenda  fita"  and  paid  what- 
ever was  demanded  by  their  exploiters;  or,  if  they  could  not  pay,  they 
remained  away  hungry  in  the  darker  corners  of  their  homes. 

Alanaos  is  a  white  man's  city,  if  there  is  one  in  Brazil.  Not  only 
are  the  shops  mainly  in  the  hands  of  Europeans  or  "Turks,"  but 
virtually  all  manual  labor  is  done  by  barefooted  white  men, — Portu- 
guese, Spanish,  or  Italian  for  the  most  part.  The  boinas  of  the  Py- 
renees are  frequently  seen  on  the  heads  of  carters  and  carriers;  the 
laboring  class,  both  male  and  female,  is  largely  from  the  Iberian  penin- 
sula,— Portuguese  women  of  olive-white  complexions  darkened  by  the 
grime  of  a  life-time,  with  huge  earrings  dangling  against  their  necks, 
and  men  who  would  look  perfectly  at  home  in  any  Spanish  pueblo  or 
Galician  mountain  village.  Many  of  the  customs  of  Rio  have  been 
imported,  too,— the  bread-man's  whistle,  the  vegetable  i)eddler  with  his 
two  baskets,  the  stick-clapping,  walking  clothing-stores  from  Asia 
Minor.  Yet,  according  to  the  American  of  most  standing  in  Manaos, 
eight  months  a  year  is  as  much  as  any  white  foreigner  should  live  in 


478  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

the  place.  He  knew  many  a  bright,  well -educated  young  Englishman, 
who  had  been  sent  out  hale  and  hearty,  to  remain  so  physically,  but  to 
become  so  childish  in  mind  that  he  had  sometimes  wondered  whether 
there  was  not  something"  in  the  German  claim  that  the  British  are  de- 
generating. Is  civilization,  after  all,  determined  by  climate?  "After 
a  white  man  has  lived  steadily  for  twenty  years  in  the  tropics,  the  less 
said  about  him  the  better,  as  a  general  rule,"  asserted  this  exiled  fellow- 
countryman.  Energy  depends,  in  his  opinion,  on  variable  climate ;  the 
monotony  of  perpetual  summer  saps  ambition;  bracing  Europe  and 
North  America  must  forever  remain  breeding-,  or  at  least  feeding- 
grounds  for  the  rulers  of  tropical  lands. 

Strangely  enough,  there  are  no  classes  in  Manaos  street-cars,  and  one 
may  ride  even  without  socks.  The  tramway  and  electric-light  system 
is  English  owned  and  is  so  British  that  the  cars  run  on  the  left-hand 
track ;  yet  its  intellectual  motive  power  was  furnished  by  a  man  from 
far-off  Maine.  I  had  not  spoken  a  word  of  English  since  leaving  Para, 
and  naturally  lost  no  time  in  finding  an  excuse  to  make  his  acquaint- 
ance. He  had  brought  with  him  his  native  adaptability.  It  has  always 
been  a  great  problem  in  Brazil  to  get  street-car  fares  into  the  coffers 
of  the  foreign  companies  operating  them.  Cash  registers  are  of  little 
use,  for  they  respond  only  to  actual  ringing.  It  is  more  common  to 
require  the  conductor  to  carry  a  booklet  of  receipts  and  hand  one  out 
whenever  a  fare  is  paid.  But  the  difficulty  is  to  make  people  demand 
the  receipts,  for  the  usual  Brazilian  way  is  to  wave  a  hand  backward 
at  the  conductor,  as  much  as  to  say,  "Oh,  keep  the  money !  The  com- 
pany is  rich,  and  they  are  foreigners  anyway."  Years  ago  some  street- 
car manager  thought  up  the  plan  of  making  each  receipt  worth  two  reis 
to  charity,  the  company  once  a  month  paying  to  the  nuns'  hospital  that 
amount  for  each  one  turned  in  to  them.  This  system,  widespread  in 
Brazil,  was  in  vogue  in  Manaos  when  the  man  from  Maine  arrived,  but 
it  was  not  working  perfectly.  The  new  manager  knew  that  charity  to 
others  is  a  far  less  potent  motive  with  Brazilians  than  possible  personal 
fortune  and  the  universal  love  of  gambling.  He  withdrew  the  charity 
clause,  therefore,  gave  each  of  the  receipts  a  number,  and  on  the  second 
day  of  every  month  the  Manaos  tramway  company  holds  a  lottery 
drawing,  with  the  first  prize  ioo$  and  the  rest  in  proportion.  It  is  a 
rare  Mcnaocnse  who  does  not  demand  his  receipt  for  fare  paid  nowa- 
days. 

The  only  other  American  resident  of  ^Tanaos  was  Briggs,  It  was 
doubly  worth  while  to  call  on  Briggs,   for  in  ar'dition  to  the  good 


UP  THE   AMAZON   TO   BRITISH    GUIANA  479 

fellowship  which  quickly  arises  between  compatriots  exiled  in  far-olT 
lands,  free  beer  was  unlimited  to  those  to  whom  Briggs  took  a  liking — 
and  for  those  who  have  to  pay  for  it,  beer  is  a  rare  luxury  in  Manaos. 
Briggs  was  the  man  who  made  Manaos  endurable,  who  kept  it  cool  and 
(juenched  its  thirst,  a  man  who  always  made  one  think  of  ice  and  iced 
drinks,  though  there  was  nothing  icy  about  him.  He  was  dictator  and 
commander-in-chief  of  the  ice-plant  at  the  tall  Manaos  brewery,  native 
owned  but,  strangely  enough,  run  by  a  German.  I  hesitate  to  admit, 
failed,  in  fact,  to  compute,  the  number  of  times  I  might  have  been  seen 
emerging  from  Briggs'  sanctum  wiping  from  my  mustache  the  cir- 
cumstantial evidence  of  a  glass  of  beer. 

Of  other  amusements  and  pastimes  there  were  still  a  few  automobiles 
for  hire  and  a  rare  surviving  cafe  chantant,  or— well,  when  the  semi- 
monthly steamer  from  Rio  came  in  with  the  list  of  prizes  in  the  national 
lottery  a  government  band  sat  before  the  lottery  agency  and  played  all 
the  morning,  while  firecrackers  were  exploded  and  the  lottery  winnings 
were  paid.  That  was  the  Manaos  idea  of  industry  and  "combatting  the 
present  grave  crisis."  The  zoo  was  gone,  of  course,  and  the  imposing 
state  theater,  the  aculcjo  dome  of  which  rose  high  al)Ove  all  else  except 
the  cathedral  tower,  had  not  been  opened  for  more  than  two  years  and 
was  a  dried-mud  ruin  within.  It  was  not  as  in  the  "good  old  days" 
when  a  carregador  got  a  fortune  for  carrying  a  scringueiro's  trunk 
across  the  praqa,  and  spent  it  to  hear  imported  opera  sung  in  the  proud 
theater  at  the  top  of  the  knoll.  There  were  still  dramatic  companies 
direct  from  Europe,  changing  every  night  as  they  made  the  rounds  of 
the  three  theaters  under  one  ownership — but  they  came  on  reels  that  fit 
into  a  lantern.  The  plot  of  the  story  they  told  was  never  a  mystery ; 
it  consisted  succinctly  of  the  adventures  of  two  men  and  a  woman  or,  m 
contrast,  of  two  women  and  a  man.  These  original  and  refreshing 
themes,  presented  nightly  under  a  new  title  and  disguised  in  a  new  near- 
Parisian  costumes,  continued  to  attract  such  stray  coins  as  still  re- 
mained in  Manaos,  not  to  mention  those  to  whom  there  arc  no  earthlv 
barriers.  I  had  often  told  myself  that  what  Brazilian  theaters  neede^l 
was  a  turnstile  at  the  entrance,  and  was  surprised  to  find  that  the 
cinemas  of  Manaos  had  exactly  that  thing.  But  system  and  strictness 
lead  haunted  lives  in  Brazil.  I  stood  at  the  door  of  the  principal  cinema 
one  evening  and  counted  just  as  large  a  percentage  of  "deadheads"  as 
even  the  Kinetophone  had  ever  attracted.  For  instead  of  having  a 
register  on  the  turnstile  and  requiring  the  door-keeper  to  turn  in  a 
ticket  for  every  click  of  the  stile  or  pay  the  price  of  one.  he  was  allowed 


48o  WORKING  NORTH  FROAI  PATAGONIA 

to  use  his  own  judgment  as  to  who  should  go  in  free — and  the  judg- 
ment of  a  BraziHan  door-tender!  In  short,  Manaos  was  entirely  an 
crxotic  city,  which  even  the  few  cahodos  and  Indians  paddling  down  to 
market  in  their  canoes  do  not  tinge  with  the  local  color  and  things  native 
to  Amazonia. 

I  had  come  up  the  Amazon  with  the  faint  hope  of  being  able  to  make 
my  way  overland  from  Manaos  to  the  capital  of  British  Guiana.  Such 
a  trip  should  be  wild  enough  to  allay  any  craving  for  the  wilderness  for 
some  time  to  come,  and  even  if  one  could  scarcely  call  plunging  along 
jungle  trails  taking  to  the  open  road,  the  effect  would  be  about  the  same. 
Even  in  Manaos,  however,  no  one  knew  whether  or  not  it  was  possible 
to  reach  Georgetown  by  land.  Launches  and  bafcloes,  a  species  of 
Amazonian  barge,  sometimes  went  up  the  Rio  Branco  to  the  frontiers 
of  Brazil  to  bring  down  cattle,  but  they  could  go  only  at  the  height  of 
the  rainy  season,  when  the  Rio  Branco  was  flooded,  and  the  last  one 
had  made  the  trip  in  August,  nearly  nine  months  before. 

"He  who  has  no  dog  goes  hunting  with  the  cat,"  the  Brazilians  say, 
so  I  turned  my  attention  to  the  possibility  of  making  the  journey  through 
my  own  exertions.  That,  too,  it  seemed,  was  out  of  the  question. 
Even  had  I  bought  a  canoe  and  hired  a  crew,  it  would  have  required 
at  least  two  months  of  constant,  laborious  paddling  to  bring  me 
to  the  Guianese  frontier;  and  as  to  walking,  that  would  have  been  as 
impossible  in  this  Amazonian  wilderness  as  on  the  open  sea.  My  hopes 
had  reached  their  lowest  ebb  when  word  reached  my  ears  that  heavy 
rains  in  the  interior  were  rapidly  raising  the  Rio  Branco,  and  that  if 
they  continued,  the  first  hateldo  of  the  season  would  set  out  for  what 
is  known  as  the  Brazilian  Guyana  on  May  25.  I  settled  down  to  en- 
dure with  as  much  patience  as  I  could  muster  a  wait  of  half  a  month, 
and  in  all  likelihood  more,  in  such  a  climate  and  surroundings. 

On  the  morning  of  May  20,  however,  I  was  still  sleeping  soundly 
when  the  barefoot  Portuguese  carregador  I  had  subsidized — at  nothing 
a  day — to  look  after  my  traveling  interests  put  his  head  in  at  the  door 
and  said  that  the  boat  I  awaited  was  leaving  not  on  May  25,  but  at 
once — and  would  I  please  kindly,  senhor,  give  him  or  his  brother,  and 
not  some  common  fellow,  the  pleasure  of  carrying  my  baggage  down 
to  it.  I  knew,  of  course,  that  the  tropical  sun  had  addled  the  poor 
fellow's  wits,  for  though  it  is  a  common  thing  in  Brazil  for  boats 
scheduled  to  sail  on  May  25  to  leave  on  May  30,  or  next  month,  or  next 
year,  no  one  had  ever  heard  of  such  a  one  going  out  on  May  20. 
However,  I  could  not  throw  anything  at  a  man  whom  I  had  not  even 


UP  THE  AMAZON  TO  BRITISH  GUIANA  481 

paid  a  retaining  fee,  so  I  went  over  to  the  Arniazen  Rosas  to  inquire. 
It  was  as  I  had  suspected;  the  sun  had  been  too  much  for  the  poor 
fellow.  On  the  board  before  the  warehouse,  and  in  all  the  morning 
papers  of  Manaos,  the  Macnxy  was  still  advertised  to  leave  on  May  25. 
I  was  about  to  return  to  my  bed  in  disgust  when  I  recalled  that  I  was  in 
Brazil,  and  entered  the  armazcn  to  verify  the  chalked  figures.  Ndo, 
soilior,  the  launch  would  leave  that  very  evening.  The  owner  had  just 
arrived  in  town  and  had  decided  to  sail  at  once.  The  fact  that  several 
people  who  had  been  waiting  for  weeks  might  be  slightly  discom- 
moded if  the  craft  sneaked  away  wiliiout  them,  with  no  other  for  a 
month  or  two,  did  not  trouble  him  in  the  least.  If  ihey  happened  to 
find  out  about  tiie  change  in  plans  by  looking  at  the  stars  and  refusing 
to  believe  the  chalked  board  and  the  newspapers,  well  and  good ;  but 
the  launch  was  going  primarily  to  bring  down  beefsteal-cs  on  the  hoof 
for  Manaos,  and  passengers  were  merely  endured  as  a  necessary  evil. 

It  w^as  seven  o'clock  of  a  dark  tropical  night  when  I  ate  my  last 
Brazilian  "ice-cream,"  and  two  hours  later  that  we  began  to  crawl  away 
from  the  wharf — good-by  for  no  one  knew  how  long  not  only  to  ice- 
cream and  ice-cold  beer,  but  to  electric  lights  and  street  cars,  to  paved 
streets  and  to  reading  by  night.  The  announcement  had  read  that  the 
"Launch  Macuxy  leaves  for  the  Rio  Branco,"  w^hich  was  true  enough, 
but  I  quickly  discovered  that  passengers  left  rather  on  the  hatcldo 
hitched  beside  it,  a  huge,  unwieldy,  three-story  cattle-barge  or  scow, 
with  no  motive-power  of  its  own.  In  the  hold  and  on  the  lower  deck 
were  piled  wood  for  the  launch's  boiler,  freight,  baggage,  cattle,  pigs, 
chickens,  rancho,  or  an  unspeakable  native  kitchen,  the  third-class 
passengers,  who  paid  half-fare,  and  whatever  else  chanced  to  be  on 
board.  The  wide-open,  roofed,  upper  deck  was  reserved,  first  of  all, 
for  the  captain  and  the  owner  in  a  commodious  cabin,  then  for  the  firsr- 
class  passengers  with  their  two  "staterooms"  back  of  this.  These  had 
nothing  in  them  but  chains,  cans,  iron-castings,  and  all  the  other  odds 
and  ends  of  ship's  junk,  on  top  of  which  we  put  our  baggage  and 
changed  our  clothes.  Everything  else  took  place  on  the  open  deck, 
three  fourths  of  which  consisted  of  a  long  row  of  hammock-hooks  on 
either  side  of  a  beam  down  the  center,  imder  which  were  a  long,  narrow 
dining-table,  a  cupboard,  a  crude  water-filter  and  one  glass,  neither  of 
which  was  usually  available  for  use,  and  one  dirty  tin  wash-bowl. 
Much  baggage  was  piled  along  the  open  sides  of  the  craft,  far  aft  were 
two  tiny  partitioned-off  places,  one  a  kitchen  and  the  other  divided  into 
two  places  of  convenience,  of  which  one  had  been  turned  into  a  shower- 


482  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

bath  by  letting  a  pipe  in  through  the  ceiHng  above  and  boring  a  hole 
in  the  lowest  corner  of  the  floor  as  an  exit  for  the  river-water.  The 
shower  was  "not  working  yet,  because  this  was  the  first  trip  of  the 
year,  but  it  would  amanhd."  Meanwhile  I  dipped  up  pailfuls  of  the  Rio 
Negro  and  threw  them  over  me,  then  tossed  most  of  the  night  in  my 
hammock,  as  is  generally  the  case  when  one  takes  to  such  a  bed  after  a 
long  respite. 

We  were  by  no  means  crowded, — one  non-Brazilian  besides  myself, 
a  dozen  men,  and  some  women  and  children — but  I  left  the  complete 
inventory  to  the  long  unoccupied  days  ahead.  All  swung  their  ham- 
mocks diagonally  across  the  hatcldo  from  the  central  beam  to  the  outer 
roof-rail,  and  spent  their  nights  and  most  of  their  days  in  them.  Close 
against  our  side  of  the  boat — so  close  that  it  was  constantly  spitting 
sparks  and  cinders  into  our  hammocks — was  the  little  launch-tug  Ma- 
cuxy,  constantly  puffing  and  snorting  like  a  Decauville  engine  up  a  stiff 
grade  and  furnishing  our  only  motive  power.  The  two  craft  were  so 
balanced  that  the  launch  seemed  to  steer  easily  with  the  heavy  hateldo 
alongside,  as  is  the  custom  everywhere  on  the  upper  Amazon,  where  a 
l^arge  is  often  put  on  either  side  of  the  launch,  but  where  no  boat  is 
ever  towed.  May  is  the  usual  time  for  a  flock  of  these  craft  to  set  out 
from  Manaos  through  all  the  river  network  of  upper  Amazonia,  taking 
freight  to  the  settlements  that  cannot  be  reached  in  the  dry  season  and 
bringing  down  rubber,  "chestnuts,"  and,  in  our  case  only,  cattle. 

All  the  first  day  we  plowed  the  black  waters  of  the  Rio  Negro 
v>ithout  seeing  a  human  being  or  any  sign  of  human  existence.  There 
was  a  constantly  unbroken  line  of  dense-green  forest,  with  trees  of  all 
sizes  from  small  to  gigantic,  half -hidden  by  lianas  and  orchids,  and  all 
so  deep  in  the  vv^ater  that  they  seemed  to  be  drinking  it  with  the  ends  of 
their  branches.  The  trees  were  often  completely  covered  with  plants 
from  which  bloomed  myriads  of  pinkish  flowers  like  the  morning-glory, 
retreating  toward  noon  from  the  ardent  tropical  sun.  There  was  no 
visible  sign  of  bird  or  animal  life,  though  there  must  have  been  much 
of  both  farther  inland.  In  general  the  country  was  low  and  level,  but 
with  an  occasional  hill  or  low  bluff  masked  in  dense  forest.  Now  and 
then  there  were  small  islands,  also  thickly  wooded  down  into  the  very 
water,  though  we  saw  none  of  the  floatmg  bits  of  jungle  that  were  so 
numerous  in  the  Amazon  proper. 

There  are  places  in  Amazonia  where  steamers  have  to  stop  and  cut 
their  own  wood.  Luckily  we  were  not  reduced  to  that  extremity,  for 
there  were  rare  inhabitants  along  this  route  to  gather  and  pile  it  at  the 


UP  THE  AMAZON  TO  BRITISH  GUIANA  483 

water's  edge.  At  that,  it  took  four  or  five  hours  to  load  enough  for  a 
day's  run,  the  Indian  and  caboclo  crew  tossing  it  stick  by  stick  from 
one  to  another  along  the  gangplank,  the  last  man,  being  more  nearly 
white  and  therefore  the  most  intelligent,  counting  them  in  a  loud  voice, 
the  captain  setting  down  each  fifty  in  a  book.  For  wood  is  sold  as  well 
as  loaded  by  the  stick  along  the  Amazon,  sticks  a  meter  long,  but  rang- 
ing in  size  from  cordwood  to  that  of  a  baseball  bat,  and  costing  here 
from  35$  to  60$  a  thousand. 

Our  meals  were  tolerable,  for  the  region,  built  up  about  the  ubiquitous 
pirarucil  and  farinha  d'agoa,  with  wine  and  condensed  milk  for  those 
who  cared  to  pay  for  them.  The  greatest  drawback  was  the  service. 
Three  or  four  of  the  most  disreputable  urchins  that  could  be  picked 
up  in  Manaos  put  everything  on  the  table  at  once,  then  wandered  about 
for  some  time  looking  for  the  bell.  Even  when  that  had  been  rung, 
courtesy  reciuired  us  to  wait  for  the  captain  and  the  owner,  by  which 
time  everything  was  stone-cold.  As  in  all  Brazil,  the  diet  was  suited  to 
hearty  men  in  the  prime  of  life  engaged  in  constant  manual  labor, 
rather  than  to  a  sedentary  life  of  forced  inactivity  that  made  us  envy 
the  crew  their  wood-tossing  at  which  caste  did  not  permit  us  to  help. 
I  know  no  country  whose  national  cuisine  seems  less  to  fit  the  character 
of  the  people  and  the  climate  than  Brazil. 

Toward  dark  we  sighted  the  first  bare  spot  of  the  trip,  a  tiny  clearing 
of  four  or  five  acres  called  Conceigao,  with  a  big  tree  here  and  there 
and — what  was  more  surprising — big  granite  rocks,  the  first  native  stone 
I  had  seen  since  my  journey  into  the  interior  of  Ceara.  There  was  a 
thatched  house,  but  no  one  showed  up,  so  we  set  out  the  freight  we  had 
for  the  place, — a  huge  piece  of  machinery  something  like  a  locomotive 
piston,  hoisting  it  with  a  derrick  and  standing  it  upright  on  a  rock  pro- 
truding from  the  water,  and  sailed  away.  Next  day,  or  the  next,  or 
some  time  later  the  people  who  lived  there  could  find  the  thing  and  know 
what  it  was  for,  though  it  was  hard  to  guess  how  they  would  transport 
it  to  wherever  it  was  needed.  Later,  in  the  dimly  moonlighted  night 
and  the  densest  wilderness  of  endless  forest  and  water,  we  slowed  down 
to  a  snail's  pace  and  began  whistling  ear-splittingly,  evidently  calling  for 
someone  in  the  untracked  forest  sea.  For  a  long  time  there  was  no 
answer.  Then,  far  off  through  the  ankle-deep  trees,  appeared  a  light. 
By  and  by  we  could  make  out  that  it  was  moving  toward  us,  and  at 
length  a  canoe  paddled  by  an  Indian,  with  a  near-white  man  sitting  in 
caste-rule  inactivity  in  the  stern,  slipped  noiselessly  out  of  the  weird 
night,  the  man  boarded  us,  and  we  were  off  again. 


484  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Finally,  on  the  afternoon  of  May  22,  two  hundred  and  ten  miles  above 
Manaos,  we  turned  from  the  Rio  Negro,  which  goes  on  northwestward 
to  Ecuador  and  Colombia,  into  the  Rio  Branco,  stretching  almost  due 
north.  This  seemed  a  more  sluggish  river,  gray  in  color  with  a  slight 
brov/nish  tinge,  much  like  the  lower  Amazon,  though  quite  enough  un- 
like the  Negro  to  warrant  its  name  of  "White  River."  Born  near  the 
junction  of  Brazil,  Venezuela,  and  British  Guiana,  it  is  some  420  miles 
long  from  the  mouth  to  where  two  forks  split  it  apart.  In  this  land  of 
water  it  was  astonishing  that  there  was  not  always  water  enough  to  float 
even  these  slight-draft  river-boats.  The  name  Guyana  is  said  to  mean 
llooded-country,  and  includes  all  that  region  between  the  Amazon  and 
the  Orinoco,  so  that  there  are  not  simply  three  Guianas,  belonging  to 
European  powers,  but  five,  including  those  of  Brazil  and  Venezuela. 

It  is  estimated  that  the  immense  State  of  Amazonas,  largest  in 
America,  has  only  150,000  inhabitants,  of  whom  half  are  wild  Indians. 
It  was  not  until  late  that  afternoon  that  we  came  upon  a  hut  on  stilts, 
made  entirely  of  woven  grass,  yet  with  the  exotic  touch  of  a  sheet-iron 
door  in  one  end,  reached  only  by  a  crude  ladder  of  two  rungs.  The  in- 
habitants had  grubbed  an  acre  out  of  the  dense  jungle  on  a  little  nose  of 
land  where  another  small  river  flowed  in,  the  ground  being  then  about 
six  feet  above  water.  They  were  almost  entirely  of  Indian  blood,  but 
the  men  wore  trousers,  jacket,  and  straw  hat,  and  the  women  a  loose 
single  gown.  As  in  most  of  Amazonia,  they  were  a  curious  mixture 
of  shy,  naive  backwoodsmen  and  crafty  traders.  We  left  two  letters 
and  sent  the  crew  ashore  to  dig  six  enormous  turtles  out  of  a  captive 
mud-hole,  each  man  carrying  one  upside-down  on  his  back  across  the 
narrow  sagging  plank,  eyes,  ears,  nose  and  his  entire  body  smeared  with 
the  soft  yellow  mud  that  oozed  from  every  crevice  of  the  cumbersome 
animals.  They  were  to  furnish  us  food  on  the  way  up  the  river ;  mean- 
while the  crew  laid  them  helpless  on  their  backs  on  the  lower  deck. 
These  mammoth  Amazon  turtles  will  live  thus  for  days  without  food 
or  drink;  or  even  for  weeks  if  left  upright  and  wet  now  and  then  with 
fresh  water. 

About  the  hut  was  a  small  forest  of  mandioca  stalks  and  banana 
plants,  and  under  it  some  "freeman"  rubber,  the  usual  large  brown 
balls  with  a  hole  through  the  center,  resembling  a  bowling-ball,  but 
which  had  been  gathered  and  smoked  as  the  spirit  moved  them  by 
semi-wild  Indians,  in  distinction  to  the  "slaves"  of  the  regular  rubber 
plantations.  The  cabra,  or  Indian-negro,  owner  sent  this,  too,  on  board, 
sold  us  bananas  and  chickens,  and  took  coffee,  sugar,  and  soap  in  pay- 


UP  THE  AMAZON  TO  BRITISH  GUIANA  485 

ment.  There  are  two  trees  that  furnish  rubber.  The  better  kind, 
called  borracha,  is  procured  by  tapping  the  glossy-smooth  rubber-tree, 
and  the  other,  a  much  coarser  and  cheaper  stuff  called  caucho,  as  full 
of  holes  as  Gruyere  cheese,  is  obtained  by  cutting  down  another  kind  of 
tree.  All  dry  lands  of  moderate  altitude  along  the  Amazon  produce  the 
caucho  tree,  of  which  a  full  sized  one  yields  fifty  liters  of  milk  or 
twenty  kilograms  of  caucho',  inferior,  but  commanding  a  good  market. 
When  your  rubber  quickly  loses  its  stretch,  the  chances  are  that  in  some 
of  the  many  links  from  producer  to  consumer  the  borracha  has  been 
replaced  by  caucho. 

There  were  said  to  be  rubber  trees  of  both  varieties  in  considerable 
abundance  in  the  forests  on  either  side  of  the  Rio  Branco,  but  in  most 
of  tlie  region  the  bugrcs,  or  wild  Indians,  made  regular  exploitation 
difficult.  On  the  night  of  May  23  I  slept  north  of  the  equator  for  the 
fir.st  time  since  walking  across  it  in  Ecuador,  thirty-two  months  before. 
The  sun  laid  off  most  of  that  day,  and  it  grew  so  cold  tliat  I  had  to  put 
on  double  clothing  and  wrap  myself  in  my  hammock.  The  trees  no 
longer  stood  ankle-deep  in  the  water,  sipping  it  with  their  branches,  for 
the  bluff  banks  were  from  six  to  ten  feet  high,  with  a  reddish  soil. 
Since  leaving  Manaos  we  had  passed  two  other  craft,  smaller  launch- 
barges,  and  perhaps  half  a  dozen  canoes  creeping  along  the  lower  face 
of  the  forest.  Otherwise  there  was  no  evidence  of  human  life  along 
the  way,  except  two  or  three  huts  in  tiny  clearings  every  twenty- four 
hours.  The  first  white  men  to  enter  the  Rio  Branco  were  the  Carmelite 
missionaries  who,  in  1728,  founded  towns  and  began  catechising  the  In- 
dians. Seventy  years  later  an  insurrection  destroyed  most  of  their 
settlements,  and  though  half  a  century  ago  some  villages  along  the  Rio 
Branco  were  reported  to  have  as  many  as  "320  souls  and  40  fires,"  to- 
day a  hut  or  two  at  most  represents  most  places  marked  on  the  map. 

But  if  there  was  little  human  interest  along  the  shores,  there  was  no 
lack  of  it  on  board.     First  and  foremost  among  my  fellow-passengers 

was  Dr.  R of  Sweden,  a  professional  bug-chaser  past  middle  life, 

whose  mild  blue  eyes  blinked  harmless  innocence,  and  whose  graying 
hair  stood  up  in  pompadour  mainly  because  it  was  never  combed.  He 
had  spent  so  many  months  pursuing  bugs  along  the  Amazon  that  he  had 
become  acclimated  to  the  pajamas  and  sockless  slippers  of  all  male 
travelers  in  the  region,  and  was  just  such  a  patient,  plodding  fellow  as 
men  of  his  profession  must  be,  carrying  their  own  enthusiasm  with 
them,  and  was  ferocious  only  in  tlie  pursuit  of  insects  and  an  ostrich- 
like    appetite.     He    spoke    English    widi    difficulty    and    Portuguese 


486  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

scarcely  at  all,  so  that  we  soon  took  to  conversing  in  German,  and  I  be- 
came unwittingly  his  unofficial  interpreter.  Never  have  I  known  a  man 
more  splendidly  fitted  for  his  calling.  Bugs  of  every  species  and  de- 
scription had  such  an  affinity  for  him  that  he  did  not  need  to  seek  them ; 
they  sought  him,  and  if  there  was  a  single  insect  in  the  region,  from  a 
lone  mosquito  to  the  rarest  species  known  to  entomology,  it  was  certain 
to  apply  to  the  doctor  for  a  passage  to  Sweden,  even  though  it  was 
forced  to  crawl  inside  his  pajamas  to  make  sure  of  the  trip.  With  rare 
excepiions  the  touching  request  was  always  granted,  for  the  doctor  was 
never  without  a  large  pill-bottle  filled  with  some  sort  of  poisonous  gas, 
and  never  a  meal  did  we  eat  that  he  did  not  jump  up  from  table  a  dozen 
times  to  snatch  out  the  cork  of  his  inseparable  companion  and  slap  the 
open  mouth  over  some  intruder  on  some  part  of  the  ship's,  or  his  own, 
anatomy. 

Rough  living  in  Amazonia  is  at  least  mitigated  by  the  outwardly 
gentle,  pleasant,  and  obliging  manners  of  the  inhabitants.  It  is  the 
religion  of  the  region  never  to  complain  of  hardships  or  lack  of  com- 
fort, for  growling  at  all  these  things  would  make  them  and  those  suffer- 
ing them  unendurable.  Hence  there  was  never  any  outward  evidence 
of  anything  but  contentment  and  satisfaction,  even  in  the  face  of  the 
most  primitive  selfishness  on  the  part  of  the  two  masters  of  the  ship. 
Captain  Santos  was  a  spare  but  rather  good-hearted  Portuguese  long 
resident  in  Amazonia,  who  frankly  considered  his  passengers  an  un- 
avoidable nuisance.  Colonel  Bento  Brazil,  the  owner,  was  a  "legiti- 
mate son  of  the  Rio  Branco,"  that  is,  born  in  the  region,  though  pure 
white  and  much  traveled.  Dressed  in  the  thinnest  of  white  pajamas 
night  and  day,  he  looked  the  picture  of  hardiness  even  at  fifty,  which 
commonly  means  old  age  in  North  Brazil.  At  times  he  was  curiously 
swollen  with  his  own  importance,  seeming  to  feel  the  deepest  scorn  for 
such  simjile  persons  as  the  Swede  and  myself ;  at  others  he  displayed 
boyish  curiosity  about  the  simplest  things.  He  was  careful  in  the  exact 
degree  of  greeting  he  gave  those  we  met  along  the  river,  running  all 
the  gamut  from  an  affectionate  embrace  of  a  fellow  estate-owner  to  a 
motionless  word  in  answer  to  the  hat-off  greeting  of  some  caboclo  far 
below  his  own  caste.  All  the  best  things  on  board  he  considered  his 
own ;  he  hung  his  hammock  in  the  choicest  place  and  kept  the  good 
shower-bath  locked,  leaving  the  one  with  a  spout  in  the  roof  to  the 
passengers — though  the  captain  always  loaned  me  the  key  to  the  better 
one — at  every  meal  he  had  six  eggs,  special  fruit,  and  many  extras, 
while  the  passengers  beside  him  could  get  nothing  but  the   regular 


UP  THE  AMAZON  TO  BRITISH  GUIANA  487 

rough-and-tumble  fare.  His  constant  selfishness  was  probably  uncon- 
scious, for  it  is  every  dog  for  himself  on  the  Amazon;  nature  is  too 
primitive  and  cruel  to  allow  much  else,  and  like  the  backwoods  estate- 
owners  of  Peru  and  Bolivia,  these  kings  of  tlie  jungle  grow  unwittingly 
autocratic  and  self-centered  by  living  constantly  among  dependents. 

There  were  two  typical  Amazonian  women  of  the  well-to-do  class  on 
board,  one  about  fifty  and  the  other  nearing  thirty.  They  corresponded 
in  rank  to  the  half  dozen  Brazilian  men  on  our  upper  deck,  fairly  well- 
educated  faccndciros  of  some  means  and  of  that  peculiar  mixture  of 
world- wisdom  and  rusticity  common  to  the  region ;  but,  of  course,  being 
of  the  less  imjx)rtant  sex,  they  were  treated  as  a  lower  type  of  creation, 
as  is  the  Amazonian  custom,  and  had  the  modest,  almost  apologetic,  re- 
serve of  the  aboriginal  women.  One  of  the  two  bare  little  cabins  that 
might  have  been  staterooms  had  been  cleared  out  for  them,  and  here  they 
preferred  to  eat  seated  on  the  bare  floor,  rather  than  come  to  table  with 
strange  men.  They  never  spoke  to  any  male  on  board,  except  an  oc- 
casional unavoidable  monosyllable,  and  their  every  look  suggested 
densest  ignorance,  superstition,  and  slavery  to  custom,  a  composite  of 
the  woman-beast-of-burden  of  the  American  Indian  and  the  Arabian 
seclusion  brought  to  Portugal  by  the  Moors.  One  might  pity  them,  but 
any  advance,  even  to  make  the  trip  a  bit  more  pleasant  for  them,  would 
certainly  have  been  misunderstood  as  something  reprehensible.  At 
night,  like  everyone  else,  they  swung  their  hammocks  on  deck,  taking  the 
off-side,  and  separated  from  the  men  only  by  distance,  but  at  daylight 
they  quickly  crawled  again  into  their  little  room  and  rolled  about  the 
bare  floor  the  rest  of  the  day,  never  making  the  slightest  physical  ex- 
ertion they  could  avoid.  In  the  morning  they  crowded  together  into 
the  miserable  little  "bathroom"  aft  and  held  the  place  two,  and  even 
three,  hours,  after  which,  their  greasy  tresses  dripping,  they  raced  back 
to  their  room.  Evidently  they  squatted  on  the  floor  and  poured  water 
over  each  other  from  the  tin  can  the  younger  one  carried.  The  most 
noticeable  part  of  the  whole  performance  was  that,  in  common  with  all 
the  women  of  Amazonia,  as  far  as  my  experience  carries,  the  longer 
they  bathed  the  less  washed  they  looked.  Whether  it  is  due  to  the  mix- 
ture of  Indian  and  I'ortuguese-peasant  blood,  with  long  generations 
without  soap  behind  them,  or  to  the  greasy  Brazilian  food  oozing 
through  their  pores,  every  native  woman  I  met  along  the  Amazon  gave 
me  an  instinctive  desire  to  avoid  the  slightest  personal  contact  with  her. 
Vet  men  of  the  same  class,  and  largely  the  same  customs,  did  not 
awaken  this  feeling. 


488  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

The  near-Indian  servant  girl  of  the  pair  aroused  the  same  sensation, 
though  she,  too,  spent  hours  in  the  "bathroom" ;  even  the  little 
daughter  of  the  younger  woman  had  this  general  repulsiveness  of  her 
sex.  She  was  a  cunning  little  thing  of  four,  with  wavy  locks  and 
penetrating  black  eyes ;  yet  somehow  one  would  have  hesitated  far 
longer  to  touch  her  than  her  twin  brother.  Both  were  bathed  together 
by  the  Indian  girl  every  morning,  and  for  the  next  hour  or  two  they 
scampered  about  the  deck  in  the  costume  of  Eve  before  she  came  across 
the  fig-tree,  after  which  they  were  each  dressed  in  a  short,  thin  chemise. 
Yet  though  they  were  companions  in  many  things,  the  boy  by  com- 
parison was  "spoiled,"  mean,  selfish,  quarrelsome,  screaming  whenever 
he  was  crossed,  bawling  for  everything  he  wanted  until  he  got  it,  pound- 
ing, biting,  and  scratching  the  Indian  girl  with  total  impunity,  while  if 
the  little  girl  committed  the  slightest  fault,  she  was  pounced  upon  by  all 
three  of  her  guardians.  This  Brazilian  custom  of  petting  and  spoiling 
the  boys,  while  bringing  the  girls  up  sternly  as  somewhat  inferior  beings, 
accounts  for  many  of  the  chief  faults  of  the  male  character.  In  per- 
haps no  other  country  on  earth  does  one  more  often  meet  men  who 
need  nothing  so  much  as  a  good  man-sized  trouncing,  or  where  a  plain 
frank  word  is  so  certain  to  arouse  childish,  irresponsible  resentment,  if 
not  actual  attack. 

That  was  all  there  were  on  our  upper  deck,  except  a  white  Brazilian 
steward  who  seemed  to  be  chronically  suffering  from  the  recent  death 
of  his  grandmother  and  the  obsequiousness  of  his  low  caste,  and  the 
three  Indian  boy  waiters,  with  minds  as  ingrown  as  their  generations 
of  grime,  who  did  not  even  own  hammocks,  but  curled  up  through  the 
cold  nights  on  a  wooden  bench  or  the  bare  deck  in  the  same  two  ancient 
blue- jean  garments  they  wore  by  day.  On  the  lower  deck  were  a 
few  third-class  passengers,  indistinguishable  from  the  deck-hands,  who 
ranged  from  burly  negroes  to  muscular  Portuguese  with  almost  as 
.'imian  features,  living  as  best  they  might  on  the  bare  spots  and  barer 
food  left  over  from  the  upper  world. 

The  river  was  often  mirror-clear,  incessantly  reflecting  flat,  wooded 
tongues  of  land  jutting  out  into  it  as  far  as  we  could  see,  ever  more  blue 
with  distance.  At  rare  intervals  there  was  the  splash  of  a  big  fish 
springing  out  of  the  water ;  otherwise  the  almost  unbroken  silence  of 
primeval  nature.  Early  in  the  afternoon  of  the  fourth  day  we  stopped 
at  a  typical  hut  and  clearing  on  the  bank  to  unload  bags  of  rice  from 
Maranhao,  sacks  of  sugar,  salt,  and  coffee  from  farther  off,  an  Ameri- 
can sewing-machine  and  varied  merchandise  from  New  York,  by  way 


UP  THE  AMAZON  TO  BRITISH  GUIANA  489 

of  which  had  come  also  a  box  of  Swiss  milk.  Among  the  things  im- 
ported from  abroad  into  this  land  of  unlimited  timber  were  complete 
doors  of  matched  American  lumber,  threshold,  lintel,  lock  and  all.  Un- 
washed and  uncombed  half-Indians  of  jungle  dress  and  manner  watched 
us  at  close  range,  a  weather-beaten  female  keeping  modestly  in  the 
background.  The  Dipper,  which  for  several  years  I  had  lost  below  the 
northern  horizon,  was  now  well  above  it.  The  cool,  moon-lighted  trees 
and  river  still  slipped  slowly  but  incessantly  by  us  into  the  south,  but 
the  river  was  getting  so  low  that  it  began  to  look  as  if  we  would  soon 
run  out  of  water. 

At  dawn  of  May  25  we  found  ourselves  anchored  at  Caracarahy,  four 
hundred  and  sixty  miles  above  Manaos,  with  the  first  open  camp  I  had 
seen  in  Amazonia,  its  tufts  of  bunch-grass  quite  green,  and  the  joyful 
sight  of  a  scrra,  or  range  of  hills,  dimly  visible  to  the  north.  Yet  the 
campo  broke  easily  into  dense  woods  in  any  direction.  There  were  a 
few  scattered  barracocs,  or  thatched  warehouses,  and  three  or  four  huts 
of  natives.  The  place  exists  merely  because  there  are  falls  above,  this 
being  the  beginning  of  rising  and  rocky  country,  around  which  all 
goods  must  be  transshipped.  Here  were  twenty-four  kilometers  of 
cachociras,  or  rock  rapids,  which  may  be  passed  in  three  ways, — in  high 
water  by  the  Furo  de  Cojubim,  a  parand  or  natural  canal  flanking  the 
falls,  but  which  in  the  dry  season  is  a  mere  succession  of  mud-holes ; 
secondly,  in  certain  seasons  by  dragging  freight  in  small  boats  up  over 
the  rock  falls ;  lastly,  by  a  picada,  or  trail  cut  through  the  dense  forest. 
I  went  ashore  with  the  bug-catcher  while  the  cajjtain  investigated.  On 
the  boat  we  had  rarely  felt  a  mosquito  or  any  other  form  of  insect  pest, 
but  the  moment  we  landed  we  were  in  swarms  of  them,  especially 
annoying  tiny  flies.  Later  we  were  to  find  that  the  grassy  campo  was 
alive  with  miicuims,  an  all  but  invisible  red  bug  especially  active  in  dew- 
wet  grass,  which  conceals  itself  in  the  pores  of  the  legs  and  sets  them 
to  itching  fiercely  a  few  hours  afterward,  keeping  it  up  for  days. 

We  returned  on  board,  to  hear  the  bad  news  that  the  early  rains 
had  slackened  and  that  it  would  be  impossible  now  for  the  smaller  boat 
that  was  following  us  to  pass  through  the  canal  and  carry  us  on  up  the 
river.  The  water  must  be  six  feet  higher,  and  as  Colonel  Bento  Brazil 
put  it  laconically,  "We  may  have  to  wait  a  month  or  two,  or  it  may  fill  up 
from  one  day  to  another."  There  were  big  cattle  pens  here,  and  cow- 
boys who  tended  the  cattle  in  shipment  as  they  grazed  on  the  campo 
before  being  jerked  aboard  the  batclocs  and  carried  ofT  to  Manaos, 
which  is  reached  in  high  water  on  the  down-trip  in  forty-eight  hours. 


490  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Late  that  evening  the  captain  began  tilhng  our  barge  with  the  mal- 
treated brules,  which,  after  a  hard  drive  across  the  country,  were  swung 
by  a  winch  cable  about  their  horns  from  the  shore  corral  to  the  boat, 
often  breaking  a  rib  as  they  struck  it  and  now  and  then  a  leg  as  they 
were  lowered  into  the  hold.  No  wonder  Amazon  beefsteaks  are  tough ! 
Cattle  for  the  Manaos  slaughter-house  are  almost  the  only  down  traffic 
from  this  Rio  Branco  region,  which  produces  little  else,  being  high 
open  campo  and  almost  the  only  place  in  the  entire  State  of  Amazonas 
that  can  do  so  to  advantage.  Here  they  sold  for  from  60$  to  100$  a 
head,  and  in  the  rainy  season  can  be  transported  to  Manaos  for  about 
60$.  In  the  middle  of  the  seventeenth  century  the  Portuguese  estab- 
lished cattle-breeding  stations  here,  so  that  even  to-day  the  great 
territory  drained  by  the  Rio  Branco  is  known  as  the  "Fazenda  National" 
and  is  federal  property. 

Even  here  there  was  no  definite  information  as  to  whether  one  could 
cut  across  through  British  Guiana.  All  I  learned  was  that,  if  I  could 
reach  Boa  Vista,  there  were  two  or  three  ways  of  making  toward  the 
estate  of  an  Englishman  over  the  boundary,  but  even  he  seemed  to  be 
more  closely  in  touch  with  Brazil  and  Manaos  than  with  Georgetown. 
In  the  morning  there  appeared  on  board  a  lively  little  man  native  to 
the  region,  whom  evei*yone  called  "Antonino."  He  was  dressed  in  slip- 
pers and  the  modified  pajamas  all  males  find  most  convenient  in 
Amazonia,  had  not  shaved  for  two  or  three  weeks,  and  had  the  general 
appearance  of  a  backwoodsman  with  a  little  plot  and  a  few  cattle  of  his 
own,  who  might  be  able  to  write  his  name  with  difficulty.  In  reality, 
he  was  the  owner  of  a  large  fazenda  far  up  the  river  on  the  edge  of 
British  Guiana,  the  boundary  being  a  stream  at  his  front  door.  Be- 
neath his  lack  of  shave  he  knew  Europe  well,  though  little  of  Brazil, 
and  had  an  astonishing  knowledge  on  a  wide  variety  of  subjects.  What 
was  still  more  important,  he  was  going  to  walk  or  wade  the  twenty- 
four  kilometers  around  the  cachoeira  next  morning  to  his  own  barge- 
launch  waiting  above  the  falls  to  take  him  back  to  his  ranch.  I  be- 
queathed my  steamer-chair  to  Captain  Santos,  packed  my  valise  to  the 
screaming  point,  with  even  my  private  papers  and  twenty  pounds  in 
gold,  and  handed  it  over  to  a  pair  of  Antonino's  Indian  employees  in  a 
canoe  half -roofed  with  thatch,  who  rowed  away  into  the  evening  toward 
the  falls. 

Next  morning  I  was  disappointed  to  find  that  Antonino  had  hired 
"horses,"  as  they  called  the  wabbly,  starved,  and  degenerate  descendants 
of  those  noble  beasts  that  awaited  us,  eaten  by  vampire  bats  and  beaten 


UP  THE  AMAZON  TO  BRITISH  GUIANA  491 

stupid  by  their  unctjnhciously  cruel  Indian-Portuguese  owners.  I 
should  much  rather  have  walked,  the  cruelty  of  j,^etting  astride  such 
miserable  animals  aside,  for  my  tj;reatcst  immediate  desire  was  physical 
exercise.  A  broad-laced,  independent  Indian  "guide"  set  off  with  us 
across  open,  bunch-grass  country,  everywhere  lively  with  birds,  the 
long  scissors-tailed  tcsoura  most  conspicuous  among  them.  Mammoth 
ant-hills  stood  higher  than  horsemen  above  the  thin,  tufty  grass.  Soon 
we  entered  a  wide  road  cut  through  a  dense  forest  by  the  state  govern- 
ment, at  a  cost  to  taxpayers  of  2000  contos !  Yet  it  had  never  been  more 
than  a  iX)or  clearing  with  a  barbed  wire  fence  on  either  side,  and  now 
it  was  half  grown  up  to  jungle  again.  In  the  mass,  an  Amazon  forest 
is  deadly  monotonous;  in  detail  there  was  an  incredible  mixture  of 
species,  with  the  same  plant  rarely  half  a  dozen  times  in  the  same  spot, 
and  all  showing  a  striking  adaptability  to  environment.  The  great 
trees  stood  always  erect,  as  if  striving,  like  good  soldiers,  to  touch  with 
the  crown  of  the  head  an  imaginary  object  above  them,  spreading  out  at 
the  top  like  a  parasol  to  catch  as  many  of  the  sun's  rays  as  possible, 
wasting  no  branches  farther  down,  where  the  sunshine  never  pene- 
trates. There  were  many  rivulets  and  mud-holes,  with  a  jungle  not 
unlike  that  of  tropical  Bolivia,  except  that  the  growth  was  thicker  and 
greener,  with  more  beautiful  palms.  Antonino,  who  had  chosen  the  best 
animal,  got  out  of  sight  ahead,  the  Indian  urging  me  to  hurry ;  but  as  I 
saw  no  need  for  that,  I  spared  my  wreck  of  a  horse.  Suddenly,  toward 
noon,  we  heard  a  distant  boat-whistle,  followed  by  half  a  dozen  shots 
from  a  revolver.  The  Indian  redoubled  his  urging  and  I  strove  in  vain 
to  give  my  miserable  steed  new  life.  Then  more  whistles  sounded,  and 
the  Indian  said  dejectedly,  "There,  the  launch  is  gone." 

"Impossible,"  I  answered.  "As  it  belongs  to  Antonino  it  must  wait 
for  him." 

But  we  soon  came  upon  the  horse  Antonino  had  ridden,  tied  to  the 
rail- fence  of  a  cattle-corral  in  the  woods,  and  I  concluded  that  my  new 
companion  had  proved  a  true  Amazonian  in  thinking  of  himself  alone. 
After  taking  down  several  fences  and  putting  them  up  again,  we  came 
out  on  a  little  nose  of  land  above  the  river — and  found  Antonino  looking 
hopelessly  away  up  it. 

It  turned  out  that  Antonino,  loving  to  boast,  like  most  Latin-Americans, 
really  had  not  tlie  slightest  ownership  in  the  boat  we  had  hoped  to 
catch,  and  here  we  were  apparently  stranded  at  the  Bocca  da  Estrada, 
with  one  small,  ragged,  thatched  roof  on  poles  under  which  to  wait  for 
<lays,  if  not  weeks.     Anyway,  the  baggage  we  liad  .-ent  by  canoe  had  not 


492  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

arrived.  Antonino  professed  to  think  that  the  launch  had  stopped  just  a 
few  miles  up  the  river  to  overhaul  its  engines,  but  this  sounded  like 
another  blult  to  save  his  face.  I  quenched  my  thirst  with  a  dozen 
gourd-cups  of  yellow  river  water,  squeezing  into  it  the  juice  of  wild 
lemons,  swung  my  hammock,  and  prepared  for  whatever  might  be 
forthcoming.  It  is  fatal  to  lose  one's  temper  in  Amazonia.  A  chunk  of 
cow  that  had  been  torn  ofif  the  still  palpitating  animal  that  morning 
had  swung  unwrapped  from  the  Indian's  saddle  during  all  the  sixteen 
miles.  This  v.-e  washed,  spitted,  and  thrust  into  a  fire.  From  it  we 
slashed  slabs  still  oozing  blood  with  the  Indian's  tergado,  as  Brazilians 
call  a  machete,  and  these  being  too  tough  to  bite,  we  cut  off  each  mouth- 
ful below  the  lips  with  the  huge  knife  in  approved  South  American  cow- 
fx)y  fashion,  after  dipping  them  in  coarse  rock-salt,  tossed  handfuls  of 
dry  farinha  d  'agoa  into  our  mouths  with  it,  and  washed  it  all  down  with 
river-water  tempered  with  the  fruit  of  the  wild  lemon  tree  that  shaded 
our  ragged  roof.  Our  total  resources  were  not  enough  for  three  meals, 
and  how  long  we  might  have  to  wait  no  man  knew.  To  add  to  the 
pleasure  of  the  situation,  we  had  struck  a  veritable  colony  of  piiims, 
as  the  Bolivian  jejene,  or  tiny  gnat  of  bulldog  bite,  is  called  in 
Amazonia,  which  quickly  brought  back  memories  of  the  tattooed  skin 
with  which  had  I  emerged  upon  the  Paraguay  sixteen  months  before. 

But,  strange  to  say,  Antonino  had  partly  told  the  truth.  About  three 
o'clock  the  canoe  arrived  with  our  baggage  and  two  sweat-dripping 
Indians,  and  we  piled  in  the  rest  of  otir  belongings  and  started  on  up 
the  stream  as  if  we  really  believed  the  tale  that  the  launch  was  waiting 
not  far  above.  I  wished  to  add  to  our  speed  by  paddling,  but  there 
were  only  three  pas,  and  the  Indians  laughed  at  the  thought  of  a 
civilized  man  doing  so.  In  all  Amazonia,  with  labor  so  badly  needed, 
the  man  above  the  laboring  class  suffers  most  of  all  for  physical  exer- 
cise, and  the  development  of  the  region  is  under  the  tremendous  handi- 
cap of  the  ancient  Iberian  caste  system.  The  Indians  surely  shoveled 
water  behind  them,  however,  though  even  so  we  made  little  headway 
against  the  swift  current.  If  one  of  us  spoke  to  them,  they  instantly 
stopped  paddling  to  listen ;  hence  motionless  silence  was  our  only  salva- 
tion. 

Then  all  at  once  we  rounded  a  point,  and  there,  sure  enough,  was  the 
craft  we  were  pursuing,  barely  a  mile  ahead.  We  quickly  lost  it  to 
view  again,  and  I  waited  anxiously  until  another  bend  disclosed  it 
barely  a  stone's  throw  away  and  tied  to  the  bank !     I  should  have  been 


UP  THE  AMAZON  TO  BRi'iTSll  UUIANA  493 

less  worried  liad  1  kmnvn  that  it  uoukl  not  move  an  inch  forward  for 
anotlicr  twenty-lour  hours. 

We  found  her  a  hattered  old  German  launch  atlached  to  the  most 
ancient  wreck  of  a  harge  that  I  liad  ever  seen  alioat.  They  v. ere 
ancliored  to  a  tree  before  the  only  dwelling  in  the  vicinity,  the  home  of 
a  part-Indian  family  of  countless  children  and  innumerable  hangers-on, 
who  lived  in  a  clearing  with  several  primitive  thatched  huts.  Among 
them  was  a  youth  who  had  been  blind  from  birth,  yet  who  went  any- 
where in  the  vicinity,  through  the  dense  forest  or  across  the  river  in  a 
dugout  log,  and  did  the  same  work  as  the  rest  of  the  men,  even  to 
splitting  wood  in  his  bare  feet.  Even  here  in  the  far  wilderness  the 
women  were  Moorish  in  their  attitude.  When  a  little  gasoline  launch, 
with  two  thatched  barges  on  either  side  all  but  concealing  it,  arrived 
after  a  twenty-four  hour  trip  around  the  falls  with  a  crowd  of  men  and 
women  packed  Hke  sardines,  these  all  came  ashore  for  a  full  breath 
and  to  straighten  out  their  kinks.  Barely  once  did  they  speak  to  us 
men,  yet  when  they  were  ready  to  leave,  every  woman  and  girl  of  the 
party  went  entirely  around  the  circle,  limply  shaking  hands  with  each 
of  us,  though  we  were  nearly  all  total  strangers.  This  courtesy  is 
always  expected  in  the  far  reaches  of  Amazonia,  and  if  the  traveler 
chances  upon  a  party  of  thirty  or  forty,  it  takes  an  hour  or  more  to  get 
away. 

Near  the  house  was  a  line  specimen  of  the  japuim  tree,  hundreds 
of  oriole-like  nests  of  the  japuim-oro-pcndula  hanging  from  its 
branches.  They  are  a  noisy  bird  with  a  surprising  vocabulary,  black 
with  white  wings  having  yellow  spots,  and  yellow  from  the  hips  down, 
so  to  speak,  with  a  black  end  to  the  tail,  and  a  long,  whitish  beak.  Their 
nests  are  cleverly  woven,  with  the  entrance  near  the  top,  and  every 
morning  the  birds  clean  them  out  as  carefully  as  any  New  England 
housewife.  The  japuim  has  a  saucy,  noisy  half-cry,  half-whistle  with 
which  it  keeps  up  a  constant  hubbub  from  daylight  until  dark.  But  the 
most  striking  of  its  habits  is  its  love  of  company.  It  does  not  live  in 
single  nests,  like  our  northern  oriole,  but  hangs  scores  and  even 
hundreds  of  them  from  the  same  tree,  though  there  may  be  countless 
others  without  a  nest  for  miles  roundabout.  They  choose  trees  near 
houses,  perhaps  because  the  human  inhabitants  and  their  dogs  scare  off 
monkeys,  snakes,  bats,  and  other  creatures  that  might  do  them  harm,  and 
like  apartment  dwellers  in  our  large  cities,  they  live  so  close  together 
that  the  arrival  or  departure  of  one  bird  shakes  up  a  dozen  or  more  of 
his  neighbors. 


494  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

We  were  to  have  left  early  next  morning,  but  this  was  Brazil  and  we 
finally  crawled  away  at  four  in  the  afternoon.  The  batelao  was  a 
floating  sty.  The  hold,  directly  under  the  rotten-board  deck  on  which 
we  lived  and  where  every  step  was  precarious,  sloshed  with  bilge-water 
having  a  strong  scent  of  livestock,  and  everything  made  a  transatlantic 
cattle-boat  seem  incredibly  luxurious  by  comparison.  I  dipped  my  water 
direct  from  the  river,  but  the  crew  bailed  bilge-water  out  of  the  bottom  of 
the  barge,  and  then  filled  the  drinking-water  jar  with  the  same  bucket 
without  even  rinsing  it.  I  had  grown  faint  with  hunger  before  a  tiny 
cup  of  black  cofifee  came  to  poison  and  deceive  the  stomach,  and  not  a 
mouthful  of  food  did  we  get  until  three  in  the  afternoon.  Passengers 
are  not  taken  on  these  boats,  though  the  man  who  presents  himself  will 
not  be  put  off;  but  he  has  no  rights  and  can  make  no  demands.  We  ate, 
standing  up  at  a  dirty  little  workbench  on  the  launch,  some  beef  and 
farinJia  cooked  and  served  by  an  Indian  boy  with  a  rotting  forefinger 
that  suggested  leprosy  or  something  worse,  and  who  had  never  heard 
the  word  "wash."  There  were  three  tin  plates  on  board,  which  we 
took  turns  in  using.  Bread  is  considered  an  extravagance  along  the 
Amazon,  and  I  had  seen  none  since  the  first  day  out  of  Manaos.  Po- 
tatoes are  as  unknown  as  cleanliness.  I  would  have  given  considerable 
to  see  a  moving-picture  of  a  germ-theorist  dropping  dead  at  sight  of  us. 

In  such  predicaments  moderation  is  the  only  hope ;  eat  and  drink  no 
more  than  is  absolutely  necessary,  and  do  not  worry.  My  legs  itched 
and  tingled  from  the  mucuims  of  two  days  before ;  indeed,  our  whole 
skins  were  tattooed  with  all  manner  of  abrasions,  but  there  was  nothing 
to  do  but  play  Indian  and  smile  at  anything.  With  perfect  weather  one 
enjoyed  life,  for  all  its  drawbacks,  and  there  was  a  certain  satisfaction  in 
knowing  that  everyone  else  on  board  was  as  badly  off,  which  is  more 
conducive  to  contentment  than  living  on  cattle-boat  fare  with  the  scent 
of  first-cabin  mu.shroom  steaks  in  the  air.  Still,  active  rather  than  pas- 
sive hardships  would  have  been  preferable. 

The  captain  was  a  full-blooded  Indian  with  filed  teeth.  Many 
aborigines  and  part-breeds  along  the  Amazon,  some  of  them  "civilized" 
and  living  in  the  larger  towns,  file  their  front  teeth  to  points.  A  native 
dentist  told  me  that  this  was  not  due  to  superstition,  but  because  it 
keeps  them  from  decaying  and  saves  people  from  one  of  the  curses  of 
wild  places — toothache.  While  I  do  not  recommend  the  custom,  I 
was  frequently  assured,  both  by  Amazonian  dentists  and  the  natives 
themselves,  that  a  filed  tooth  never  spoils.  An  Indian  who  spoke 
Portuguese,  and  who  was  so  familiar  with  modern  progress  that  he 


UP  THE  AMAZON  TO  BRITISH  GUIANA  495 

made  no  objection  t(j  my  photographing  him  and  his  wife  with  their 
pointed  fangs  displayed,  said  that  the  work  had  been  done  when  he  was 
twelve,  with  a  three-cornered  file — though  the  wilder  tribes  chip  them 
off — that  the  only  hurt  was  a  few  days'  dull  ache,  and  that  the  only 
purpose  of  the  custom  was  to  save  the  teeth  and  at  the  same  time  Ik.- 
able  to  cope  with  the  tough  "green"  beefsteaks  of  Amazonia. 

The  owner  of  the  barge,  who  sat  chupando  camia — "sucking"  sugar- 
cane it  was,  indeed — ])y  the  light  of  a  brilliant  full  moon,  tried  to  force 
his  cabin  upon  me ;  but  I  declined  extra  favors  and  swung  my  hammock 
with  the  others  on  the  lower  deck  over  the  sloshing  cattle-water.  In  the 
moonlight  the  mirror-clear  river  reflected  every  hump  and  turn  of  the 
banks  far  ahead.  When  I  finally  fell  into  a  doze  in  spite  of  the  con- 
stant hubbub  on  launch  or  barge,  someone  woke  me  and  told  me  to  take 
my  hammock  away  while  the  crew  loaded  wootl,  which  they  did  for 
some  hours.  Like  a  magnet,  we  seemed  to  pick  up  everything  along  the 
river  and  drag  it  with  us.  When  daylight  came  we  were  towing  the 
launch  of  a  rival,  which  appeared  to  have  broken  down,  our  own  clumsy 
old  barge  with  some  three  feet  of  odorous  water  in  its  hold,  two  very 
large  lx)ats,  roofed,  and  with  tons  of  cargo,  a  dead  gasoline  launch,  two 
large  and  heavily  laden  rowboats,  two  empty  rowboats,  four  canoes,  and 
perhaps  seventy-five  persons  all  told,  some  of  whom  had  waited  half  a 
year  to  get  this  trip  up  the  river.  To  say  that  we  made  speed  against 
the  swift  current  would  be  exaggerating. 

We  stopped  for  wood  again  during  the  day  and  I  had  my  first  swim 
in  Amazonia,  for  here  the  danger  of  pirainhas  was  said  not  to  be  great. 
This  savage  small  fish,  having  double  rows  of  teeth  of  razor  edge  with 
which  it  tears  the  flesh  even  of  man,  is  the  horror  of  the  swimmer  in 
nearly  all  the  waters  of  the  Amazon  basin.  Let  the  skin  show  the  sug- 
gestion of  a  wound,  and  whole  schools  of  these  bloodthirsty  creatures 
dart  forward  to  the  attack  with  lightning-like  rapidity.  The  river  re- 
mained wide,  but  was  now  very  shallow,  and  much  of  the  year  it  is 
almost  completely  dry.  On  the  morning  of  May  28  we  sighted  the  first 
town  since  leaving  Manaos.  This  was  Boa  Vista,  founded  forty  years 
ago  on  the  left-hand  bank  of  the  river,  where  the  dense  forests  begin 
to  die  out  into  open  campo.  Its  red-tiled  roofs  and  other  colors  gave 
a  striking  and  welcome  contrast  after  an  unbroken  week  of  watching 
the  monotonous  unrolling  of  jungle-forested  banks.  There  were  per- 
haps forty  houses  and  huts,  including  a  church  in  ruins,  three  shops,  twi> 
dentists,  one  of  whom  was  also  the  pharmacist,  and  the  self-complacent 
air  of  a  backwoods  metropolis.     Boa  Vista  is  the  "capital"  of  th.e  cattle 


496  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

plains  of  northernmost  Brazil,  and  as  such  has  an  importance  out  of  all 
keeping  with  its  size,  like  many  another  insignificant  town  in  a  boundless 
wilderness.  Yet  it  had  the  profound  melancholy,  the  mournful  tran- 
quillity that  is  the  ordinary  existence  of  scrtancjo  populations,  where 
nearly  every  individual  is  true  to  his  relaxed  and  indolent  environment. 
There  was,  however,  really  a  "boa  vista"  for  this  region,  a  far-reaching 
view  across  the  river  and  the  grassy  plains  to  ranges  of  hills  purple-blue 
with  distance. 

For  some  days  Antonino  had  been  suffering  from  some  violent  throat 
infection,  and  he  was  now  speechless.  Everyone  advised  him  to  stay  in 
Boa  Vista,  where  at  least  there  was  a  pharmacy  and  a  dentist,  if  no 
doctor — and  the  next  boat,  I  recalled,  would  probably  be  at  least  a 
month  behind.  I  kept  silence,  however,  rather  than  let  my  own  con- 
venience tempt  me  to  advise  him ;  but  after  everyone  else  had  tried  their 
turn  at  wheedling  him  to  remain,  he  refused,  and  having  had  his  throat 
sprayed,  we  were  off  once  more.  In  the  brilliant  moonlight  that  night 
we  passed,  high  up  on  a  low  hill,  the  snow-white  chapel  of  the  monks 
of  Sao  Bento,  and  below  it  on  the  river  stood  Fort  Sao  Joaquim.  The 
old  fortress  was  built  by  the  Portuguese  in  1775  to  keep  the  Spaniards 
to  the  north  and  west  from  stealing  Portuguese  territory.  It  is  now  in 
ruins,  but  there  was  still  a  "garrison"  of  a  dozen  men  living  in  thatched 
huts  about  it. 

This  was  the  junction  of  the  Parima  and  the  Takutii  Rivers,  which 
form  the  Rio  Branco.  We  turned  into  the  latter  and  struggled  on. 
The  last  of  our  tows  had  dropped  off  at  Boa  Vista,  and  of  passengers, 
there  remained  only  Antonino,  his  servant,  and  myself.  In  the  morning 
we  were  skirting  the  broad  acres  of  the  Fazenda  Nacional.  Across  it, 
near  the  Venezuelan  boundary,  was  the  legendary  Lago  Dourado  and 
Manoa  del  Dorado,  said  to  have  been  built  by  Peru/ians  before  the 
Conquest,  where  everything  was  reputed  to  be  made  of  pure  gold.  Even 
Walter  Raleigh  took  the  existence  of  fabulous  Manoa  seriously,  and 
planned  an  expedition  to  find  and  conquer  it.  To  this  day,  however,  it 
has  not  been  discovered.  The  Manoas  were  the  most  numerous  and 
valiant  tribe  in  the  Rio  Branco  region,  but  they  grew  weak  under  mis- 
sionary civilization  and  retreated  to  British  territory,  though  they  left 
descendants  in  all  the  Amazon  basin.  It  is  the  boast  of  many  of  the 
"best  families"  of  the  Rio  Branco  Valley  that  they  are  of  the  true  aris- 
tocracy because  some  of  their  ancestors  were  Manoas. 

If  there  had  l)een  water  enough,  the  launch  would  have  taken  us  on 
up  the  Takutu  to  Antonino's  door,  but  we  were  lucky  to  be  able  to  push 


UP  THE  AMAZON  TO  BRITISH  GUIANA  497 

on  to  the  home  of  the  captain  before  the  water  ran  out.  From  the 
shallow  Takutu  we  turned  into  the  narrow  Suruniu,  with  barely  suffi- 
cient water  to  float  us.  This  the  English  once  claimed  as  the  frontier, 
but  the  King  of  Italy,  as  arbitrator,  set  it  farther  east.  The  thinly 
wooded  banks  grew  ever  closer  together,  and  in  mid-morning  we 
grounded  the  launch — the  old  wreck  of  a  bateldo,  had  been  left  before 
the  estate  of  its  owner  near  the  mouth  of  the  branch — at  the  captain's 
j'accnda,  "Carnauba."  In  the  baked-mud  house  we  were  welcomed  by 
his  good-hearted,  if  diffident  and  laconic,  part-Indian  wife  and  family. 
I  asked  the  captain  how  much  I  owed  him  for  my  passage,  at  which  he 
showed  great  surprise  and  after  long  reflection  remarked  that  he 
thought  twenty  milreis  would  be  generous.  This  was  distinctly  rea.son- 
able  for  Brazil,  and  especially  in  Amazonia,  where  the  higher  you  go 
and  the  poorer  accommodations  become,  the  more  exorbitant  are  apt  to 
be  the  charges.  Aloney  is  not  the  common  medium  of  exchange  thus 
far  up-country,  where  favors  are  usually  returned  by  some  species  of 
barter.  Thus  Antonino  was  welcome  to  ride  fi-ee  because  he  often 
shipped  cattle  by  this  launch  and  bateldo,  and  the  man  who  offers  money 
is  looked  upon  somewhat  as  a  "tenderfoot"  is  on  our  western  plains. 

Eager  to  stretch  my  legs,  I  would  have  pushed  on  without  delay.  But 
lirazil  is  Brazil,  even  on  its  edges,  and  haste  was  difficult.  First  coffee 
must  be  served ;  then  came  talk  enough  to  settle  the  terms  of  a  treaty  of 
peace,  after  which  we  finally  packed  all  but  the  most  indispensable  of 
our  baggage  and  sent  it  away  by  canoe  with  Antonino 's  servant,  who 
must  descend  again  to  the  Takutu  and  paddle  his  way  up  it.  By  this 
time  "breakfast"  was  ready,  and  we  sat  down  to  a  heavy  Brazilian 
meal  of  several  kinds  of  meat,  chicken  included,  and  farmlia  wet  in 
broth,  ending  with  the  unescapable  black  coffee.  Then  the  nearest 
neighbor,  from  several  miles  away,  dropped  in,  and  the  chatter  went  on 
while  we  lolled  in  capcchanas  sipping  more  black  coffee.  This  w^as  my 
first  accjuaintance  with  the  typical  seat  of  the  region,  a  short  hammock 
made  of  dried  cowhides  and  used  not  as  a  bed  by  night,  for  which  it 
would  lack  comfort  and  size,  but  as  a  lounging-place  by  day.  There 
were  six  of  these  capcchanas  swinging  under  the  veranda.  Cowhide 
is  so  plentiful  in  these  parts  that  stiffened  ones  are  often  set  upright  as 
walls  or  partitions.  There  was  not  a  chair  in  the  house,  though  there 
were  two  American  sewing-machines  and  a  rusty  American  phonograph 
with  a  hundred  records,  both  so  long  maltreated  that  every  song  sounded 
like  the  squawking  of  the  same  hen  in  a  slightly  different  key.  The  most 
prized  product  of  tlie  outside  world  seemed  to  be  kerosene,  used  in 


498  A\^ORKING  NORTH  FROU  PATAGONIA 

everything  from  launch-engines  to  lamps,  and  always  eagerly  sought. 
A  ten-gallon  box  of  two  cans  cost  25$,  say  seven  dollars,  and  for  several 
months  a  year  it  is  not  obtainable  at  any  price. 

First  we  were  to  start  at  ten,  then  at  noon ;  now  we  must  wait  until 
the  sun  was  lower.  A  dozen  horses  were  rounded  up  in  the  corral,  where 
two  were  lassooed,  and  for  once  it  looked  as  if  1  were  to  have  a  real 
mount.  But  the  captain  insisted  on  having  him  tried  out  first,  and 
after  fiercely  bucking  and  rearing  for  some  time,  he  took  the  Indian 
peon  on  his  back  for  a  gallop  which  he  ended  suddenly  by  throwing  the 
rider  over  his  head  into  a  shallow  pool,  breaking  the  ancient  weather- 
rotted  leather  of  both  saddle  and  bridle — which  was  lucky,  for  other- 
wise we  might  never  have  recovered  them.  I  was  quite  willing  to  try 
my  luck,  if  they  would  catch  him  again,  but  the  captain  insisted  on 
choosing  a  substitute,  which  turned  out  to  be  another  of  those  equine 
rats  it  seemed  always  my  fate  to  ride  in  South  America,  Notwitli- 
standing  his  unpromising  appearance,  however,  I  was  no  sooner  astride 
him  than  he  gave  a  splendid  plea  for  admission  to  a  Wild  West  show, 
bucking,  jumping  up  into  the  air  and  coming  down  stiff-legged  on  all 
fours,  kicking,  rearing,  and  finally  taking  the  cowhide  "bit"  in  his  teeth 
and  galloping  wildly  away  across  the  bushy  campo.  For  a  time  I  was 
undecided  whether  to  stay  on  his  back  or  catapult  over  his  head,  but 
decided  that  the  ground  was  hard  and  that  the  honor  of  my  race 
depended  on  my  performance  before  those  Amazonian  gauchos.  Some- 
how, therefore,  even  with  the  kodak  over  my  shoulder  thumping  me 
in  the  back  at  every  jump,  I  kept  aboard  and  returned  to  the  house, 
which  astounded  the  natives  so  profoundly  as  to  imply  that  every  other 
"gringo"  of  their  acquaintance  had  toppled  limply  off  at  the  first  jump. 

Even  when  I  got  him  quieted  down,  the  animal  was  so  ticklish  that  if 
a  foot  or  a  bush  touched  him,  he  instantly  went  through  the  im- 
personation of  a  bronco  all  over  again,  so  that  a  dozen  times  that  after- 
noon I  had  the  same  sport.  Antonino  in  time  caught  up  with  me  and 
we  rode  on  together  across  a  great  plain,  with  scrub  trees  here  and  there, 
many  clusters  of  the  burity  palm  from  the  fan-like  fronds  of  which  all 
roofs  of  the  region  are  made,  and  countless  tepecuim,  conical  ant-hills 
from  six  to  ten  feet  high.  The  range  of  hills,  which  I  now  knew  to  be 
the  Kanuku  Mountains  in  British  Guiana,  stood  out  blue,  yet  clear, 
against  the  far  eastern  horizon  when,  about  five  o'clock,  we  stopped  at 
the  "Fazenda  Maravilha"  on  a  bank  of  the  Takutu  River.  It  was  a 
"marvel"  only  in  its  own  estimation,  though  the  part-Indian  owners 
showed   all   the   hospitality   of    the   region   by    not    only   serving   the 


UP  THE  AMAZON  TO  BRITISH  GUIANA  499 

ceremonious  black  coffee,  but  by  insisting  that  wc  remain  for  ihe  evening 
meal.  Here,  also,  there  were  leather  hammocks,  and  a  sadly  abused 
phonograph  which  did  its  best  to  entertain  us.  We  were  ofT  again  at 
dusk,  meaning  to  take  advantage  of  the  full  moon;  but  the  clouds  were 
thick,  and  even  after  it  appeared  we  saw  little  of  it.  Before  it  rose  we 
stumbled  upon  what  Antonino  called  a  "maloca,"  a  cluster  of  huts  built 
and  intermittently  inhabited  by  more  or  less  wild  Indians.  In  the 
darkness  between  two  of  the  shanties  we  found  a  pair  of  Indian  youths, 
dressed  in  the  remnants  of  cotton  shirts  and  trousers  and  lying  in  their 
only  other  possession, — old  hammocks  swung  from  posts  under  the  pro- 
jecting eaves.  They  belonged  to  the  Macuxy  (pronounced  "ma-coo- 
shee")  tribe  scattered  through  the  hills  of  the  three  countries  about  the 
source  of  the  Rio  Branco.  My  companion  wanted  them  to  go  back  to 
*'Maravilha"  and  help  row^  his  canoe  and  baggage  home  next  day,  and 
the  argument  he  was  forced  to  put  up  resembled  that  of  a  spellbinder 
seeking  votes.  In  words  of  one  syllable — for  they  understood  little 
Portuguese — and  with  such  reasoning  as  one  might  offer  a  child  of  six^ 
he  told  them  at  least  a  dozen  times  that  he  would  pay  them  two  days' 
wages,  either  in  food  or  money,  and  that  they  might  be  on  their  way 
again  the  following  evening.  Though  they  admitted  that  they  had  not 
eaten  that  day,  that  they  had  no  water,  and  asked  for  tobacco,  their 
unvarying  reply  was  an  indifferent  monosyllable,  and  it  was  only  after 
half  an  hour  of  pleading  that  they  gave  a  grunted  promise  to  roll  up 
their  hammocks  as  soon  as  the  moon  was  high  and  be  in  "Maravilha"  in 
lime  to  start  up  the  river  at  dawn. 

Soon  we  came  to  a  muddy  igarapc  that  our  animals  refused  for  a 
long  time  to  cross,  and  finally,  toward  what  was  perhaps  midnight,  the 
barking  of  a  pack  of  curs  drew  our  attention  to  a  hut  and  corral  and 
announced  us  to  their  unwashed  owner.  He  invited  us  to  swing  our 
hammocks  inside,  give  us  each  a  nibble  of  miserable  native  cheese,  and 
eventually,  a  discussion  of  the  news  of  the  day  having  been  exhausted, 
let  us  fall  asleep.  The  chief  item  of  interest  which  Antonino  had 
brought  with  him  was  that  a  youth  known  to  himself  and  our  host  had 
resorted  to  the  plan,  still  usual  in  those  parts,  of  stealing  a  woman,  but 
who  this  time  happened  to  be  a  widow.  The  hut-owner  refused  to  be- 
lieve it,  saying  in  a  surly  grunt  that  "of  course  Pedro  is  old  enough 
now  to  hunt  him  a  woman,  but  whoever  heard  of  stealing  a  zi'idozv!" 
The  scorn  in  his  tone  is  inexpressible  in  words.  Long  before  daylight 
we  saddled  again,  drank  a  glass  of  foaming  milk  still  warm  from  the 
corral,  and  struck  out  across  bushy  campo,  rather  sandy  and  very  dry. 


500  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

An  unusual  clanger  on  these  great  savannahs  is  that  wild  horses,  espe- 
cially stallions,  roaming  the  plains  attack  mounted  animals,  sometimes 
biting  mouthfuls  out  of  them,  if  not  out  of  the  rider.  Several  pursued 
us,  and  one  big  black  brute  would  not  give  up  his  nefarious  project 
until  I  had  fired  my  revolver  over  his  head.  About  seven  we  came 
upon  another  hut,  where  the  usual  limp  handshakes  and  mutual  in- 
quiries as  to  the  health  of  families — for,  of  course,  Antonino  knew 
ever3-one  in  the  region — was  followed  by  the  exchange  of  local  gossip 
until  coffee  had  been  made  and  served.  An  hour  later  there  was  a 
similar  halt  at  a  similar  hut.  Life  in  Brazil  is  just  one  black  coffee 
after  another.  Here  there  v/as  a  branch  of  the  Takutu,  to  be  crossed 
in  a  canoe,  swimming  our  horses  and  resaddling  them,  after  which  a 
long  and  fairly  swift  trot  brought  us  at  last  to  the  home  of  Antonino. 

It  was  by  no  means  as  sumptuous  a  place  as  his  choice  of  language 
had  led  me  to  picture,  but  at  least  it  was  more  comfortable  than  the 
mud  hut  in  which  we  had  spent  part  of  the  night.  There  was  a  large 
thatched  and  once  white-washed  adobe  house  standing  forth  on  a  big 
l)are  spot  at  the  top  of  a  slight  bluff  above  the  Takutu,  and  three  or 
four  smaller  huts  and  a  corral,  all  of  which,  with  several  hundred  dry 
and  sandy  acres  about  them,  Antonino  had  inherited  six  years  before 
from  his  mother-in-law.  The  site  was  on  the  extreme  edge  of  Brazil, 
where  the  Takutu  makes  an  almost  complete  turn  and  the  Mahii  flows 
into  it,  and  it  would  have  been  easy  to  throw  a  stone  from  Antonino's 
door  over  onto  British  territory.  I  had  looked  upon  my  companion  as 
almost  a  youth,  yet  his  wife,  younger  than  he,  was  already  old  and  gray, 
and  his  daughter  of  thirteen  was  in  the  physical  prime  of  life  and  visibly 
longing  for  a  husband.  These,  a  son,  and  Antonino's  brother,  dying  of 
tuberculosis,  made  up  the  household,  though  there  was  the  usual  swarm 
of  Indian  or  half-Indian  servants. 

After  a  swim  in  the  boundary  and  a  mammoth,  though  rough, 
dinner,  I  was  led  to  the  "chaletsinha,"  a  small  mud-and-thatched  hut  re- 
served for  visitors,  for  even  here  it  would  have  been  scandalous  to 
lodge  a  male  friend  in  the  same  house  with  one's  women  folk.  The 
floor  was  of  unleveled  earth  and  there  were  a  dozen  hammock -hooks,  be- 
tween two  of  which  I  napped  for  a  couple  of  hours.  Meanwhile  the 
lif teen-year  old  son  had  been  sent  over  into  British  Guiana  to  summon 
the  "Americano."  Ever  since  I  first  met  him  Antonino  had  insisted 
that  a  compatriota  of  mine  lived  just  across  the  boundary  from  his 
fajjcnda,  but  I  had  so  often  found  in  South  America  that  men  reputed 
to  be  my  compatriots  turned  out  to  be  Italians,  Syrians,  negroes,  or 


UP  THE  AMAZON  TO  BRITISH  GUIANA  501 

something  else  as  un-American,  that  I  had  given  Uttle  attention,  and  no 
faith,  to  his  assertion.  My  surprise,  as  well  as  my  delight,  was  all  the 
greater,  therefore,  when  there  suddenly  walked  in  upon  me  a  magnifi- 
cently built,  handsome  type  of  outdoor  American  in  the  early  prime  01 
life  and  the  visible  pink  of  condition,  his  ruddy  health  in  striking  con- 
trast to  the  chalky  faces  of  the  indoor  Brazilians.  He  was  Ben  Hart 
from  South  Dakota,  who  had  gone  first  to  Panama,  then  to  the  Madeira- 
Mamore,  later  had  prospected  for  gold  around  Sorata,  and  finally  had 
come  to  British  Guiana  eight  months  before  with  an  American  partner 
to  start  a  cattle  ranch.  The  partner  had  an  English  wife,  however,  and 
when  the  war  broke  out  he  had  gone  to  London  to  enlist  and  left  Hart 
alone.  I  was  the  first  "white  man"  he  had  seen  in  half  a  year,  and 
though  he  could  not  assure  me  that  I  could  reach  Georgetown,  never 
having  been  there  himself,  he  did  "hope  I  would  come  over  and  stay  a 
few  weeks  with  him." 

On  the  last  day  of  May  we  walked  a  couple  of  kilometers  over  bushy 
campo  and  dried  bogs  to  a  fringe  of  woods  on  the  edge  or  the 
Mahu,  across  which  Hart  hallooed  to  his  Indian  boys  about  a  newdy 
thatched  hut  visible  on  the  opposite  bank.  They  soon  appeared  in  an 
aged  dugout,  the  gim wales  of  which  were  under  water,  but  with  boards 
nailed  above  them,  a  precarious  craft  that  would  have  filled  in  ten 
minutes ;  but  luckily  the  trip  lasted  only  three.  Thus  I  was  removed 
bag  and  baggage  from  Brazil  eleven  months  to  a  day  from  the  time  I 
had  entered  it  from  Uruguay.  That  day  I  was  firmly  convinced  that 
nothing  short  of  penal  servitude  would  ever  again  get  me  back  into  the 
mammoth  land  of  the  imperial  palm  and  political  corruption ;  but  time 
cures  most  lacerations  of  the  skin  and  nothing  is  so  disagreeable  at  a 
distance  as  it  is  close  at  hand.  The  Brazilian  bubbles  over  with  faults. 
As  my  old  friend,  Professor  Ross,  puts  it,  "he  much  prefers  the  lollipops 
of  compliment  to  the  pungent  olive  of  truth" ;  yet  there  is  something 
fascinating  about  both  him  and  his  gigantic,  wasted  national  domain. 
Long  after  his  grafting  politicians  and  his  untrounced  men  and  boys 
have  become  the  dimmest  of  memories,  his  magnificent  palms,  swaying 
beneath  peerless  skies,  his  incomparable  capital  and  the  songs  of  his 
sabids  remain  vividly  etched  in  a  crowded  recollection ;  and  when,  on  a 
dark  and  dreary  winter  day  in  the  Puritan- weighted  North,  I  read  again 
some  of  the  swinging,  color-flashing  lyrics  of  Casimiro  d'Abreu,  nothing 
but  the  Portuguese  word  saudade  expresses  the  longing  that  comes  over 
me  to  behold  again  those  marvelous  days  and  luminous  nights  of  whicl.* 
he  sings. 


CHAPTER   XX 

STRUGGLING    DOWN    TO    GEORGETOWN 

BEN  HART  lived  about  forty  yards  back  in  British  Guiana. 
Having  passed  the  frontier  without  sinking,  we  scrambled  up 
the  steep,  sandy  bank  of  a  river  that  had  changed  its  name  from 
the  Mahu  to  the  Ireng  while  we  were  crossing  it,  strolled  through  a  bit 
of  bone-dry,  bunch-grass  prairie,  and  turned  in  at  the  first  house.  We 
could  scarcely  have  missed  it,  for  there  was  not  another  for  many 
miles  within  the  colony.  Hart  had  built  it  himself,  with  the  help 
of  his  "siwashes."  as  he  called  the  Indian  boys  who  made  up  his 
indefinite  retinue, — a  temporary  structure  in  the  approved  style  and 
only  available  material  of  the  region,  the  walls  of  brush  and  mud,  an 
earth  floor,  and  a  thick,  top-heavy  roof  of  palm-leaves.  Later  on  he 
planned  to  build  a  real  house  a  few  miles  up  the  river.  Cow-hides, 
worth  nothing  whatever  in  this  region,  but  which  his  employees  were 
obliged  to  turn  in  to  prove  that  an  animal  was  dead,  were  used  for 
every  imaginable  purpose, — as  doormats,  wind-shields,  rugs,  even 
to  stand  on  down  at  the  "old  swimming-hole"  where  we  took  a  dip 
every  night,  though  pirainhas  abounded  and  an  alligator  had  recently 
eaten  Hart's  best  dog. 

He  lived  as  everyone  does  and  must  in  those  parts,  with  certain 
improvements  of  American  ingenuity.  A  fire  built  on  the  ground  was 
his  cook-stove,  though  he  made  a  kind  of  bread-cake  in  an  iron  pot 
turned  into  an  oven,  the  only  bread  in  all  that  region.  We,  too,  ate 
farinha,  however,  either  dry  or  wet  down  with  beef  broth.  This 
Brazilian  staflF  of  life  tastes  exactly  like  sawdust,  but  swells  to  several 
times  it  original  size  and  is  very  filling  and  evidently  nourishing.  Then 
his  Indian  boys  cut  up  dried  beef  and  boiled  it;  now  and  then  Hart 
let  go  a  gun  at  a  chicken,  and  occasionally  a  steer  was  killed,  when 
everyone — neighbors,  servants,  Indians,  dogs,  chickens,  and  buzzards — 
gorged  themselves  for  a  day  on  fresh  meat,  after  which  the  rest  was 
cut  into  strips,  salted,  and  sun-dried.  The  dessert  common  to  all  that 
region  was  "coalhado,"  milk  turned  sour  and  thick  as  pudding  and 
«aten  with  sugar.     Then  there  were  plenty  of  eggs,  and  milk  without 

502 


STRUGGLIXCi  DOWN  TO  GEORGETOWN  503 

limit  was  to  be  had  for  the  milking,  since  liart  already  liad  hundreds 
of  cattle,  as  well  as  man\-  horses,  few  of  which  he  saw  once  a  month. 
Hammocks  hung  under  the  long  protruding  roof,  as  well  as  inside  the 
house,  and  a  cool  breeze  was  always  blowing  across  the  savannahs,  as 
the  British  call  what  the  rest  of  South  America  knows  as  cauipo  or 
pampa,  in  this  region  between  three  and  four  hundred  feet  above 
sea-level. 

Hart's  closest  companions  were  a  pair  of  hounds,  now  with  a 
litter  of  pups.  As  the  cur  dogs  of  the  Indians  make  a  great  hullabalo(j 
at  sight  of  a  white  man,  so  breed  dogs  are  at  once  friendly  with  an 
Englishman  or  an  American,  but  will  not  let  an  unknown  Indian 
approach  the  house  while  the  master  is  away  and  never  make  friends 
with  the  aborigines.  About  the  hut  hovered  three  dog-like  Macuxy 
Indian  boys,  who  did  all  the  odds  and  ends  of  work  and  lived  on 
the  odds  and  ends  of  beef  and  farinha,  neither  getting  nor  expecting 
any  wages,  except  a  place  they  might  call  home.  They  hung  their 
hammocks  under  a  thatched  roof  on  legs  some  distance  away  and  now 
and  then  received  a  few  yards  of  cotton  cloth  which  they  turned  into 
clothing,  for  it  is  surprising  how  these  children  of  the  wilds  can  make 
even  a  tolerably  fitting  jacket.  These  Indian  boys  were  never  hired, 
but  were  unconsciously  acquired.  One  of  them  would  turn  up  and 
go  to  work  without  a  word,  cooking,  washing,  milking,  and  doing  the 
other  tasks,  all  of  which  took  perhaps  four  hours  a  day,  and  it  would 
not  be  until  they  had  remained  longer  than  is  customary  for  visitors 
that  Hart  realized  they  were  permanent  employees.  Brazilians  in 
this  region  may  during  the  course  of  a  year  give  a  cowboy  or  an 
Indian  servant  a  cast-off  cotton  suit ;  hence  word  of  the  greater  gener- 
osity of  the  American  had  quickly  spread  and  the  difficulty  was  not 
how  to  get  help,  but  how  to  keep  rid  of  too  much  of  it.  There  were 
also  fourteen  vaqueiros,  who  lived  with  the  cattle  and  were  rareljf 
seen  at  the  house,  and  to  these  Hart  furnished  farinha  and  paid  two 
milreis  a  day,  not  in  money  but  in  cloth  and  other  goods,  for  though 
the  milreis  serves  as  a  basis  of  computation,  there  is  no  fixed  medium 
of  exchange  and  barter  is  still  almost  universal.  The  little  actual 
money  with  which  he  had  arrived  Hart  had  laid  away  months  before 
and  never  seen  since,  and  he  had  no  fear  of  its  being  stolen,  though 
he  kept  well-locked  the  back  room  in  which  he  stored  his  piles  of  cloth. 
Indeed,  when  he  set  out  with  me  on  a  trip  that  might  have  lasted 
two  or  three  weeks,  it  never  occurred  to  him  to  take  money  with  him. 
The  z'aqu-eiros,  of  course,  killed  a  steer  whenever  they  wanted  meat. 


304  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

turning  in  the  hide  to  show  that  they  had  not  sold  the  animal  over 
the  border.  Neither  Hart  nor  his  "siwashes"  spoke  any  Portuguese 
worth  mentioning,  so  that  their  conversation  consisted  chiefly  of 
grunts  and  brief  gestures,  with  now  and  then  an  American  or  Por- 
tuguese word  which  happened  to  be  familiar  to  both  sides.  The 
Indian  boys  had  found  that  certain  sounds  represented  certain  actions, 
so  that  when  they  were  told  to  "build  fire"  they  knew  what  was 
wanted,  though  the  separate  words  meant  nothing  to  them.  They 
had  learned  a  few  expressions  so  well  that  they  even  ventured  to 
pronounce  them,  and  each  evening  after  the  dishes  had  been  washed 
and  the  fire  put  out,  they  filed  solemnly  past  us,  each  einitting  a 
dubious  "Goot  neety"  on  the  way  to  their  barracao.  Their  general 
attitude  was  about  like  that  of  a  cat.  They  drifted  in  from  nowhere 
and  stayed  unasked,  quiet  and  unaggressive,  yet  in  a  way  independent 
and  in  no  way  affectionate.  They  knew  that  some  day  Hart  would 
give  taem  a  hat  or  a  few  yards  of  cloth,  and  even  without  that  reward 
they  were  quite  pleased  to  have  the  prestige  of  living  with  so  "rich"  a 
man. 

^lore  than  12,000  square  miles  of  this  back  end  of  British  Guiana 
is  high,  open  savannah,  splendid  for  cattle ;  but  the  government  refuses 
to  sell  it  and  merely  issues  "permissions  to  graze"  on  little  patches  of 
fifty  square  miles,  or  36,000  acres  each,  at  the  exorbitant  rental  of  three 
pounds  a  year!  Hart  was  the  sixth  man  to  be  issued  such  a  permit, 
one  of  the  others  being  a  German  and  the  rest  Englishmen,  while  in 
all  the  immense  savannahs  of  British  Guiana  only  four  Brazihan 
fasendeiros  had  chosen  to  remain  after  the  boundary  award.  Hence, 
in  addition  to  his  legal  holding,  there  were  some  200,000  acres  more 
over  which  his  cattle  might  freely  roam.  The  cattle,  too,  were  obtained 
by  barter.  Soon  after  his  arrival,  by  way  of  Brazil,  Hart  had  an 
entire  boatload  of  goods  brought  up  from  Georgetown, — dozens  of 
cheap  felt  hats,  belts,  soap,  particularly  many  bolts  of  coarse,  strong 
cotton  cloth  in  gaudy  patterns.  No  one  else  for  many  miles  round- 
about had  any  such  stock  on  hand;  hitherto  the  Brazilians  over  the 
border  had  been  obliged  to  go  to  Boa  Vista,  or  even  to  Manaos,  to 
get  such  things.  Moreover,  Hart  did  not  take  unfair  advantage  of 
them,  but  charged  the  same  prices  as  prevailed  in  Manaos ;  that  is, 
he  asked  3$  or  3$500  for  a  yard  of  cloth  that  cost  perhaps  six  pence 
in  Georgetown,  so  that  they  were  delighted  to  do  their  shopping  so 
near  home,  and  as  they  rarely  had  anything  but  animals  to  pay  with, 
he   had  already   bought   twelve  hundred   head   of   cattle   and   eighty 


STRUGGLING  DOWN  TO  GEORGETOWxN  505 

horses  without  making  serious  inroads  on  his  boatload  of  cloth.  A 
Brazilian  rancher  anxious  to  give  his  wife  or  his  own  legs  a  surprise 
would  ride  fifty  miles  or  more  across  country,  driving  before  him 
a  cow  and  a  calf,  and  sell  them  to  Hart  for  6c$ — that  is  for  twenty 
yards  of  cloth  which  had  cost  Hart  $2.50.  The  visitor  would  depart 
highly  satisfied  with  the  exchange,  while  Hart  branded  the  animals  and 
added  ihem  to  his  stock  on  "Good  Luck  Ranch,"  known  across  the 
river  as  "Fazenda  Americana."  A  horse  and  colt  came  to  about  350$, 
say  a  hundred  yards  of  the  best  cloth,  at  an  original  cost  of  $14;  a 
plump  steer  might  be  worth  two  felt  hats  and  a  belt ;  yet  Hart's  prices 
were  considered  so  reasonable  that  people  flocked  in  upon  him  from 
all  directions.  Now  it  might  be  an  Indian  of  some  property,  v.ho  dined 
while  his  wife  and  child  waited  out  in  the  rain  until  he  was  done  and 
called  them  in  to  eat  what  he  had  left ;  or  it  might  be  a  fellow-rancher 
who  had  neglected  to  keep  up  his  own  supplies.  Occasionally  pay- 
ment was  long  delayed,  but  was  almost  always  sure.  Sometimes  he 
was  paid  beforehand,  as  when  a  fasendeiro  with  whom  he  might  spend 
the  night  would  tell  him  to  drive  such  and  such  animals  home  with 
him,  promising  to  come  over  later  and  get  some  cloth.  There  was 
nothing  of  the  skinflint  about  Hart.  He  followed  the  time-honored 
custom  of  the  region,  with  an  American  generosity  added;  and  of 
course  there  was  the  high  expense  and  risk  of  boating  the  stuff  up  the 
rivers,  keeping  it  under  lock  and  key  in  his  back  mud  room,  and  the 
shop-keeping  bother  of  selling  it.  Once  he  lost  an  entire  cargo  worth 
$2000,  when  the  Indians  who  were  bringing  it  to  him  let  the  boat 
go  over  some  falls.  But  he  hoped  to  have  four  or  five  thousand  head 
of  cattle  in  as  many  years,  and  to  come  to  the  rescue  of  the  world's 
scarcity  of  beef  and  leather  as  soon  as  some  means  was  provided  for 
reaching  the  markets.  Just  now  the  greatest  drawback  was  lack 
of  transportation.  The  governor  of  the  colony  had  recently  made  a 
trip  to  the  savannahs,  and  a  railroad  was  planned,  but  the  war  had 
postponed  it.  x\merican  capital  would  build  the  line,  but  only  on 
condition  of  certain  land  grants,  and  the  governor  was  set  on  having 
it  a  government  railway. 

Meanwhile,  I  soon  discovered,  it  was  much  easier  to  come  in  at 
the  back  door  of  British  Guiana  than  to  get  from  there  down  to  the 
front  portal.  Small  as  it  looks  on  a  map  of  the  whole  continent, 
England's  South  American  colony  is  more  than  twice  the  size  of 
Great  Britain.  It  was  340  miles  down  to  the  coast  as  the  crow  Hies. 
and  vastly  more  than  that  to  any  but  winged  creatures.     With  78.500 


5o6  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

square  miles  of  unbroken  forest  and  matted  jungle,  only  the  four- 
lunidrcd-and-sixtieth  part  of  which  was  even  under  woodcutter's 
license,  there  is  no  means  of  travel  back  of  the  fringe  of  coast  except 
by  the  rivers,  and  these  are  much  broken  by  falls  and  dependent  on 
the  season.  Hart's  latest  letter  from  the  United  States  had  been  five 
months  on  the  way. 

The  first  leg  of  a  journey  to  Georgetown  was  to  cross  the  divide 
between  the  Brazilian  and  Guianese  river  systems,  some  fifty  miles 
in  its  narrowest  part,  but  much  more  than  that  to  the  home  of  Com- 
missioner Melville  on  the  upper  Rupununi,  which  for  several  reasons 
was  the  logical  starting-point  of  a  journey  down  to  the  coast.  Hart 
had  been  planning  to  go  over  to  Melville's  within  the  next  few  weeks, 
and  we  compromised  on  his  getting  ready  as  soon  as  possible,  which 
was  to  be  within  ten  days.  The  delay  I  spent  to  advantage,  for  Hart 
was  a  pleasant  companion  and  the  region  full  of  interest.  Now  we 
trotted  over  several  hundred  of  his  acres  looking  for  a  troop  of  mares 
in  charge  of  a  tyrannical  stallion ;  twice  we  roamed  the  lightly  wooded 
savannahs  checking  up  on  his  cowboys  and  their  charges.  One  day 
we  went  back  to  Brazil  to  visit  Antonino  and  his  family,  the  only  near 
neighbors  and  the  most  nearly  educated  and  civilized  people  in  the 
vicinity.  We  brought  back  with  us  twenty  cows  and  as  many  calves, 
driving  them  to  the  river,  lassooing  and  dragging  them  down  the 
bank,  rolling  in  mud  and  drenched  with  perspiration  and  tropical 
downpours,  and  taking  each  calf  across  in  the  leaky  dugout,  the 
mother  swimming  behind.  There  are  no  frontier  formalities,  the 
ranchers  of  both  sides  being  their  own  sovereigns  in  all  matters,  and 
Hart  was  as  free  to  import  cattle  as  he  was  to  drive  them  over  to  the 
Takutu  at  the  beginning  of  high  water  and  sell  them  to  the  barges 
from  Manaos. 

We  set  out  for  Melville's  on  June  5.  Hart  said  it  was  a  four-hour 
ride  to  the  St.  Ignatius  Mission,  but  I  knew  how  deceiving  distances 
can  be  in  South  America,  as  well  as  the  many  unexpected  obstacles  that 
often  turn  up  in  wilderness  travel,  and  was  not  too  pleased  when  we 
put  off  the  start  until  some  time  after  noon.  Hart  rode  a  gray 
stallion  with  Texas  trappings  and  led  a  pack-horse  carrying  our  bag- 
gage, as  awkward  as  packs  always  are  and  requiring  frequent  halts  for 
adjustment.  My  bay  horse  had  plenty  of  life,  but  with  only  the  pre- 
carious monkey-seat  the  English  call  a  saddle  I  was  kept  busy  thwarting 
his  frequent  attempts  to  leave  me  behind.  The  first  hour  across  Hart's 
broad  grazing-lands  was  fairly  dry,  though  our  delay  had  brought  on 


STRUGGLING  DOWN  TO  GEORGETOWN  507 

the  rainy  season  again,  landless  stretches  of  fine  prairie-grass,  aher- 
nating  with  thin  scrub  forest,  lay  beyond.  The  first  house  was  a  ruin 
in  thatch  once  occupied  by  a  Scotchman  and  his  squaw  ;  the  next  had 
belonged  to  an  exiled  Brazilian.  Every  ruined  hovel  had  its  story. 
There  was,  for  instance,  the  one  in  which  Hart  had  met  and  tamed 
the  "Ocean  Shark."  A  giant  negro  from  the  thickly  settled  coast, 
charged  with  two  murders  and  many  lesser  crimes,  had  so  named 
himself  when  he  fled  to  the  interior.  However  good  a  government 
may  be,  it  is  far  away  and  hard  to  reach  in  so  sparsely  populated  a 
country,  where  every  man  must  be  his  own  law  and  protection.  When 
Hart  first  came,  this  black  outlaw  was  roaming  these  upper  plains 
with  a  band  of  servile  and  frightened  Indians,  bullying  even  white  men, 
if  they  would  stand  for  it.  An  Australian  had  picked  up  the  Indian 
woman  abandoned  by  the  Scotchman,  with  her  daughter  and  son, 
and  settled  down  with  her  in  the  hut  in  question.  One  day  he  came 
home  and  found  the  "Ocean  Shark"  already  occupying  his  hammock. 

"You  see  dat  tree  over  dere?"  said  the  negro.  "Well,  jes'  yo  swing 
yo  hammock  out  dere.    I'se  here  now." 

The  Australian,  being  a  man  who  valued  his  skin  more  than  his 
honor,  complied,  and  the  negro  acted  as  his  domestic  substitute  for 
a  week  before  whim  or  rumor  caused  him  to  move  on.  He  was  con- 
stantly bullying  the  smaller  ranchers  and  killing  their  cattle,  and  at 
length  he  let  word  drift  out  that  he  was  going  to  do  the  same  for  Hart, 
The  American,  however,  well  over  six  feet  and  weighing  190  pounds 
without  an  ounce  of  fat.  was  built  on  "shark"-taming  lines.  Moreover, 
his  partner  had  just  left  for  the  war  and  he  was  feeling  very  blue  and 
spoiling  for  a  fight  when,  on  his  way  home  to  his  new  ranch,  it  was 
his  good  luck  to  find  that  the  "Ocean  Shark"  had  camped  in  the  chief 
hut  of  a  nearby  Indian  village.  With  him  was  his  "secretary."  a 
small  yellow  negro  named  Cecil,  for  the  "Sha'k"  could  not  read  or 
write. 

"What  are  you  doing  here?"  demanded  Hart,  ridir»^-  up  to  the  hut. 

"Ah  don'  know  what  dat  got  t'do  wid  yo,"  answered  the  "Sha'k." 

"You  black  !"   said  Hart.     "I  asked  you  what  are  you 

doing  here." 

"Don'  yo  curse  me !"  screamed  the  negro,  in  the  bold  terms  of  the 
British  "object"  the  world  over,  though  already  a  bit  tremulous  from 
the  seriousness  of  his  situation. 

Hart  was  by  nature  anything  but  a  belligerent  man.  but  his  future 
in  the  colony  depended  on  the  evidence  he  gave  at  the  start  of  being 


5o8  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

able  to  take  care  of  himself.  He  sprang  from  his  horse,  drew  his 
heavy  revolver,  and  rapped  the  "Ocean  Shark"  over  the  head  vi^ith 
the  butt  of  it.  Then  he  thrust  the  weapon  back  into  its  holster  and 
waded  into  the  negro  in  approved  mining-camp  style,  rapidly  changing 
his  color  from  black  to  red,  and  ended  by  giving  him  ten  minutes  to 
pack  his  traps  and  remove  his  battered  face  forever  from  that  corner 
of  British  Guiana.  During  that  time  the  Indians  who  formed  the 
negro's  band  ran  back  and  forth  "just  like  ants"  collecting  his  belong- 
ings, and  every  time  his  "secretary"  had  to  pass  the  American  he  took 
off  his  hat,  ducked  as  if  to  dodge  a  blow,  and  said,  "Yessir!  Yessir !" 
Soon  the  whole  caravan  was  on  the  move  and  the  "Ocean  Shark"  had 
never  been  seen  in  this  region  since,  though  fanciful  tales  continue  to 
drift  in  of  the  "free  city"  he  and  his  obsequious  followers  have 
founded  in  another  corner  of  the  colony. 

At  two  in  the  afternoon  we  reached  the  Manari  Creek  and  found 
it  too  deep  to  cross  on  horseback,  though  when  Hart  had  passed  that 
way  a  week  before  it  had  not  been  knee-deep.  That  is  the  greatest  diffi- 
culty of  the  overland  trip  from  Manaos  to  Georgetown ;  one  can 
only  get  up  the  Rio  Branco  in  the  rainy  season,  which  is  the  very 
time  when  the  savannahs  are  flooded  and  virtually  impassable.  Luckily 
I  am  fairly  tall,  and  Hart  was  taller.  We  unloaded,  stripped,  and 
carried  everything,  including  the  saddles,  across  on  our  heads,  the 
water  just  reaching  my  nostrils.  Then  we  gave  the  horses  a  bath, 
for  which  they  seemed  grateful,  went  through  all  the  loading  process 
again,  and  rode  on,  the  crossing  having  cost  us  more  than  an  hour. 
There  were  more  bogs  and  creeks,  but  all  were  passable,  and  we  had 
only  to  stop  occasionally  to  adjust  the  pack.  All  the  time  we  kept 
drawing  nearer  the  Kanuku  Mountains,  now  a  long  blue  range  across 
the  southern  horizon.  We  had  to  pass  around  the  end  of  this  to  get 
to  Melville's,  which  was  almost  due  south,  though  I  was  supposed  to 
be  traveling  north. 

It  was  five  o'clock  when  we  reached  the  first  inhabited  house,  that 
of  a  Brazilian  family  on  a  bank  of  the  Takutu.  The  usual  formalities 
included  insistence  that  v/e  wait  for  coffee,  and  as  Hart  did  not  care 
to  risk  making  an  enemy,  we  complied.  These  people  assured  us  that 
all  the  igarapes  were  so  swollen  from  the  recent  rains  that  it  would 
be  impossible  to  get  to  Melville's  at  this  season.  Not  far  beyond  we 
came  to  a  stream  which  Hart  had  easily  forded  the  week  before.  I 
drove  my  horse  in,  expecting  the  water  to  come  at  most  to  his  belly, 
when  the  animal  suddenly  dropped  and  took  to  swimming,  with  the 


STRUGGLING  DOWN  TO  GEORGETOWN  509 

water  about  my  waist.  There  was  no  way  of  getting  our  pack-animal 
across  without  ruining  everything.  We  returned  to  the  BraziHan  hut, 
and  while  I  took  such  measures  as  my  soaking  and  that  of  the  saddle- 
gear  demanded,  Hart  stripped,  tied  his  clothes  around  his  head  with 
a  strap  under  his  chin  to  hold  them,  and  swam  the  igarapc  to  an  Indian 
hovel  where  he  arranged  for  a  canoe  and  two  paddlers.  These  dropped 
down  the  stream  to  us,  and  having  hobbled  the  horses  and  put  the 
saddles  astride  a  pole  always  provided  for  such  purposes  under  the 
eaves  of  rural  Brazilian  huts,  we  and  the  Indians  lugged  our  baggage 
to  the  canoe  and  finally  set  out  in  pitch  darkness  to  paddle  up  the  river 
to  what  Hart  called  the  "padre's  house." 

Like  the  one  in  which  I  had  entered  the  colony,  the  canoe  was  a 
leaky  old  dugout  with  rotting  boards  nailed  along  the  sunken  gunwale, 
through  which  water  gushed  almost  in  streams.  I  had  to  hug  the  two 
ba'^s  on  the  seat  beside  me  and  at  the  same  time  bail  water  incessantly, 
while  the  Indian  boys  shoveled  water  at  the  bow  and  Hart  made  a 
poor  job  of  steering  in  the  stern,  because  it  was  impossible  to  tell  the 
shadows  from  the  tops  of  the  trees  under  water  near  the  bank,  which 
we  were  compelled  to  follow  closely  in  order  to  make  any  progress 
against  the  swift  current.  Even  there  and  with  the  utmost  effort  we 
made  barely  a  mile  an  hour,  and  every  loss  of  a  stroke  for  any  reason 
left  us  so  much  farther  down  stream.  The  Takutii  was  about  four 
times  as  deep  as  when  I  had  last  left  it,  and  was  now  a  real  river. 
Several  times  I  was  nearly  knocked  off,  bags  and  all,  by  unexpected 
branches  of  trees;  then  suddenly  I  discovered  that  the  boat  was  filling 
faster  than  I  could  bail  it  out,  the  water  quickly  reaching  my  ankles 
and  then  my  calves.  It  would  n't  matter  so  much  to  Hart,  who  had 
brought  only  a  few  tramping  necessities,  but  it  was  only  a  question 
of  a  very  short  time  before  all  my  South  American  possessions,  including 
even  my  money  in  the  valise,  would  be  at  the  bottom  of  the  Takutu, 
while  I  struggled  ashore  in  my  heavy  brogans  with  only  my  hat  and 
my  reputation.  I  shouted  to  the  Indians,  who  looked  around  and 
saw  the  water  which  they,  being  high  in  the  bow,  had  not  felt,  and 
by  sheer  luck  they  managed  in  the  darkness  to  tear  a  way  through 
tree-tops  and  bushes  to  a  spot  on  the  bank  with  bare  land  enough 
to  hold  our  baggage.  Here  we  found  that  a  snag  had  kicked  a  large 
hole  in  the  stern  of  the  rotten  old  craft  and  that  water  was  pouring 
in  as  from  a  faucet.  This  repaired  as  best  we  could,  we  bailed  out 
the  boat  and  pushed  on.  For  what  seemed  hours  we  fought  against 
the  current  and  bailed  incessantly  before  a   faint  light   far  away  in 


510  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

the  night  announced  that  we  were  approaching  the  mission.  We  could 
not  seem  to  bring  the  Hght  nearer,  but  finally  managed  to  land  in  the 
mouth  of  a  tributary,  and,  tearing  through  the  jungle  and  stumbling 
over  stony  ground  in  the  black  night,  lugging  our  baggage,  we  at  last 
ended  at  nine  o'clock  the  "easy  four  hours'  ride"  from  Hart's  ranch 
by  entering  the  mission  of  an  English  Jesuit,  Father  Ignatius  Cary- 
Elwess. 

It  was  a  big,  two-story,  thatched  building  on  the  bank  of  the  upper 
Takutu,  just  across  from  Brazil.  Indian  men  and  boys,  chiefly  in  loin- 
cloths, though  some  wore  a  shirt  and  some  the  remnants  of  trousers, 
swarmed  about  the  place  with  perfect  freedom,  as  the  "padre"  seemed 
to  have  an  easy-going  way  that  had  weakened  his  control  over  them. 
He  was  a  small,  wiry  man  of  middle  age,  dressed  in  an  old  soutane, 
quite  English,  yet  also  quite  Jesuit,  which  made  a  curious  combination. 
Eleven  years  before  he  had  come  out  entirely  alone  and  lived  in  their 
huts  with  the  Indians,  under  exactly  the  same  conditions  as  they,  until  he 
had  learned  the  Macuxy  tongue — at  least  as  v/ell  as  the  average 
Englishman  ever  learns  a  foreign  language.  He  knew  no  Portuguese, 
and  the  naked  Indian  youths  spoke  an  amusing  mixture  of  English 
and  Macuxy,  the  former  chiefly  represented  b}^  "Fader,  yes,"  with 
which  all  statements  began,  usually  continuing  in  the  native  tongue. 
The  priest  was  "one  of  the  boys"  in  the  stories  he  told,  but  he  often 
drifted  away  into  dreams.  After  nearly  four  years  in  Latin-America 
it  seemed  strange  to  hear  the  Engli^ih  names  of  things  I  had  only 
known  in  Spanish,  Portuguese,  or  Ouichua, — "bush"  for  sertdo, 
"Savannah"  for  pampa  or  campo,  "'gator"  for  jacare.  It  was  sixty- 
three  days  since  the  padre  had  last  heard  a  word  of  the  world's  news, 
and  the  long  time  which  elapsed  before  our  generous  supper  was  ready 
we  spent  in  bringing  him  up  to  date,  getting  out  of  our  soaked  garments, 
oiling  our  revolvers,  and  swinging  our  hammocks. 

Vvhen  I  rose  in  the  early  morning  a  cold  wind  was  blowing  across 
the  open  country.  About  the  mission  building  was  a  cluster  of  huts 
for  the  converts,  and  many  cattle  were  grazing  nearby — for  the  good 
padre  did  not  neglect  the  practical  things  of  life.  He  was  already 
saying  mass  before  an  outdoor  altar  set  in  the  side  of  a  mud  house, 
assisted  in  his  formalities  by  otherwise  naked  Indian  acolytes  in  red 
robes.  A  creek  near  the  mission,  which  one  could  generally  step  across, 
was  so  swollen  that  we  had  to  borrow  a  canoe,  and  the  top  branches 
of  high  trees  just  peered  out  of  the  water.  We  soon  came  to  another 
— whereupon  Hart  decided  that  we  were  sure  to  lose  the  horses  if 


STRUGGLING  DOWN  TO  GEORGETOWN  51  r 

we  tried  to  continue  the  trip  with  them.  The  only  animal  which  can 
endure  travel  under  such  conditions  is  man,  and  we  concluded  to  resort 
to  the  only  means  of  locomotion  left  us.  \\'hcn  we  returned  to  the 
mission,  the  padre,  who  had  hccn  a  famous  athlete  in  his  younger  days, 
left  off  a  cricket  game  he  was  playing  in  his  flowing  soutane  with  the 
Indian  boys,  and  went  with  me  to  fiiid  us  Indian  carriers.  His  rule 
was  too  lenient,  however,  and  the  day  drifted  on  without  anyone 
offering  to  go.  He  would  not  order  anyone  to  do  so,  as  most  of  the 
Indians  had  come  for  some  Catholic  celebration  and  the  padre  felt 
that  they  could  not  be  spared.  "Anyway,"  he  mused,  "by  far  the 
best  carriers  are  the  women — women" — his  eyes  fell  suddenly  on 
Hart,  conspicuously  masculine  in  his  splendid  frame  and  perfect  con- 
dition— "we— er — well,  I  '11  send  for  the  chief  and  see  if  he  can't  get 
you  two  men" — the  accent  on  the  last  word  was  probably  unconscious. 
It  was  afternoon  before  a  father  and  his  son  were  finally  prevailed 
upon  to  make  the  one-day  journey  to  the  next  village,  and  at  two  we 
were  off  across  country.  The  man,  about  thirty-five  in  years,  but  already 
old  for  his  race,  was  as  ill-fitted  for  his  task  as  the  average  white  man 
of  sixty,  and  was  constantly  being  favored  by  his  son  of  eighteen, 
in  the  prime  of  life.  We  were  soon  stripping  to  wade  a  stream  neck- 
deep,  clothes,  revolver,  kodak,  and  other  odds  and  ends  on  our 
heads,  and  had  barely  dressed  again  when  we  came  to  a  swamp  of 
such  extent  that  we  swamg  our  shoes  over  our  shoulders  for  the  rest 
of  the  day.  It  was  stony  here  and  there,  but  more  often  swampy, 
with  bogs  in  which  we  sank  to  the  knees  and  several  streams  waist 
or  chest  deep;  but  the  water  was  lukewarm  and  the  going  almost 
pleasant,  though  we  envied  the  Indians  their  natural  leather  soles. 
That  evening  we  reached  an  Indian  hut  made  entirely  of  palm-leaves, 
and  swung  our  hammocks  from  poles  with  the  family.  Our  carriers 
chattered  long  in  the  native  tongue  with  our  otherwise  taciturn  hosts, 
using  the  word  "fader"  in  nearly  every  sentence.  We  made  our  own 
tea  and  ate  our  own  farinJia  and  rather  green  bananas,  to  which  the 
Indians  added  a  square  foot  or  more  of  mandioca  bread,  here  called 
"cassava."  Gnats  made  life  miserable  for  me,  but  Hart  and  the 
Indians  took  turns  snoring  all  night,  while  the  wife  of  our  host  stood 
or  squatted  in  a  far  corner  of  the  hut,  stirring  the  fagot  fire  every 
half  hour  or  so,  darkness  evidently  being  a  cause  for  fear,  and  gently 
punching  her  fat  husband  every  time  his  snoring  grew  uproarious. 
Not  only  the  men  and  children,  but  cur  dogs  and  fowls  slc])t  in  the 
comfortable  hammocks;  but  either  it  is  immoral,  by  their  tribal  laws, 


'512      WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

for  a  woman  to  lie  down  while  there  is  a  stranger  in  the  house,  or  it 
is  the  admirable  custom  for  the  woman  to  sit  up  all  night  and  keep 
her  lord's  fire  burning.  Yet  there  is  a  vast  difference  in  the  comfort 
of  life  between  these  tropical  Indians  and  those  of  the  Andes,  a  differ- 
ence due  mainly  to  one  thing, — the  hammock.  Their  floors  may  be  as 
hard  and  as  filthy,  even  as  cold  at  times,  but  swinging  above  it  in  a 
soft,  native-woven  hammock  is  like  living  in  another  sphere.  The 
hammock  is  the  most  important  thing  in  the  life  of  the  Indian  of  this 
region,  as,  indeed,  of  all  residents.  He  is  conceived  in  a  hammock, 
born  in  a  hammock ;  a  hammock  is  his  chair,  sofa,  and  place  of  siesta, 
it  is  his  bridal  bed  and  his  death  bed,  and  usually  it  is  his  shroud,  for 
it  is  the  custom  to  bury  him  in  the  hammock  in  which  he  dies.  If 
he  travels  in  light  marching  order,  the  Indian  may  leave  everything 
else  behind,  except  his  loin-cloth,  but  he  carries  his  hammock. 

Rain  fell  heavily  most  of  the  night,  and  we  did  not  once  put  on 
our  shoes  during  the  next  day.  Our  feet  were  under  water  certainly 
half  the  time.  Barely  had  we  started  when  we  had  to  wade  a  deep, 
muddy  creek,  followed  by  a  long  swamp;  and  similar  experiences 
continued  in  swift  succession.  The  vast  savannah  was  dotted  with 
scrub  trees,  but  there  was  no  sign  of  life  except  occasional  birds.  The 
Kanuku  Mountains,  everywhere  heavily  wooded  and  blue  with  the 
mist  and  rain  that  always  hangs  about  them,  drew  slowly  nearer  on 
our  left.  This  region  might  be  dubbed  the  "Land  of  Uncertainty," 
for  one  never  knew  what  might  be  waiting  a  mile  ahead,  whether  we 
would  have  to  come  all  the  way  back,  after  struggling  through  most 
of  the  trip,  because  of  some  impassable  obstacle.  Particularly  the 
Suwara-auru,  a  branch  of  the  Takutu  which  foams  down  from  the 
Kanuku  range,  was  likely  to  prove  such  a  barrier. 

We  were  already  soaking  wet,  so  that  we  paid  little  attention  to  the 
roaring  rain  that  soon  began  to  fall,  though  I  still  strove  to  keep  my 
kodak  from  being  ruined.  Even  the  shoes  on  our  backs  were  as  wet 
as  if  we  had  worn  them.  Our  baggage,  on  the  Indians'  backs,  was 
covered  with  old  pieces  of  canvas,  but  the  rain  poured  down  in  cata- 
racts upon  it  and  promised  to  soak  everything  it  contained.  To  make 
things  worse,  the  Indians  could  not  keep  up  with  us.  The  aged 
thirty-five-year-old  man  was  in  sad  straits,  and  we  were  in  constant 
dread  of  his  falling  down  in  some  mud-hole.  At  downpouring  noon 
we  reached  the  base  of  the  range  of  hills  and  began  to  skirt  it,  the 
storm  making  a  tumultuous  yet  musical  sound  on  the  dense  forest. 
In  dry  weather,   no   doubt,   it   would  be   screaming   with   parrakeets, 


STRUGGLING  DOWN  TO  GEORGETOWN  5^3 

though  it  is  said  always  to  be  raining  in  the  Kanukus.  Deep  in  the 
woods  we  stopped  among  mammoth  trees  at  tlie  bank  of  a  creek  to 
assuage  our  gnawing  hunger.  It  was  pouring  incessantly,  yet  tlie  older 
Indian  got  a  fire  started,  roofed  by  green  banana-like  leaves,  and  into 
this  we  thrust  slabs  of  sun-dried  beef  spitted  on  sticks.  We  made  tea, 
also,  and  each  ate  his  rationed  half-pint  of  farinha,  which  would  soon 
swell  to  a  quart.  All  this  time  we  had  not  a  suggestion  of  shelter  and 
the  water  ran  down  us  in  streams  throughout  the  meal,  washing  our 
fingers  as  rapidly  as  we  soiled  them.  Yet  somehow  we  felt  in  unex- 
pectedly good  spirits.  Hart  rolled  three  cigarettes,  handed  two  of 
them  to  the  Indians,  and  we  were  off  again.  The  forest  grew  ever 
denser,  and  the  rain  became  an  absolute  torrent.  Only  in  crossing  the 
Malay  Peninsula  years  before  had  I  bowed  my  back  to  such  volumes 
of  water,  water  which,  as  the  ground  grew  a  bit  hilly,  rushed  down 
the  narrow  ruts  worn  by  former  travelers  so  swiftly  as  almost  to 
sweep  us  off  our  feet. 

With  every  step  forward  I  grew  more  uneasy.  We  were  drawing 
near  the  notorious  Suwara-auru,  situated  where  the  forest  that  spills 
down  a  spur  of  the  mountains  is  thickest  and  the  rainfall  is  said  to 
be  the  heaviest  in  all  British  Guiana,  and  which,  according  to  Hart, 
"the  devil  himself  often  could  not  pass."  It  may  be  knee-deep  in 
the  dry  season,  and  a  week  later  fill  up  the  whole  gorge  or  valley 
with  a  rushing  current  half  a  mile  wide — a  gorge  still  densely  forested, 
too,  for  there  are  trees  everywhere,  except  in  the  bit  of  space  occupied 
by  the  creek  in  the  dry  season,  and  horses  have  been  killed  by  the 
force  with  which  the  current  hurls  them  against  the  trunks.  Of 
course  man  himself  can  pass  under  almost  any  conditions ;  but  it  might 
well  be  impossible  to  get  even  such  baggage  as  I  carried  across,  and 
I  might  have  to  go  clear  back  to  Manaos,  or  wait  for  months  until 
the  rains  subsided. 

The  gorge  promised  to  be  at  its  worst  that  day,  for  most  of  the  streams 
we  had  passed  were  near  their  high-water  mark.  Yet  the  Suwara-auru 
was  not.  When  we  finally  came  to  it  I  shouted  above  the  storm  to  ask 
Hart  if  this  almost  placid  stream,  which  barely  reached  the  lower 
branches  of  the  trees,  was  the  mighty  obstacle  about  which  I  had 
been  hearing  for  days.  But  such  is  the  tenacity  of  a  bad  reputation  that 
my  companion,  never  attempting  to  cross  it  as  we  had  many  others, 
tore  his  way  upstream  with  great  difficulty,  gashing  his  feet  and 
tearing  his  clothing  in  his  fight  with  the  jungle,  to  a  half-submerged 
tree-trunk  that  offered  a  possible  but  precarious  crossing.     Meanwhile 


514  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

I,  skeptic  from  birth,  had  thrown  off  revolver  and  kodak,  waded  in — 
and  crossed  with  the  water  barely  to  my  armpits !  Before  Hart  could 
fight  his  way  back  I  had  taken  the  Indian  youth  over  twice,  with  all 
my  belongings  on  his  head,  though  he  was  so  much  shorter  that  the 
water  came  to  his  nostrils  and  I  had  to  walk  close  to  him  on  the  down- 
stream side  to  keep  him  and,  what  was  more  important,  my  posses- 
sions from  being  washed  away.  Then,  with  my  help,  he  carried  his 
father's  load  across,  and  the  old  man  managed  to  cross  "empty." 
Through  it  all  it  kept  raining  as  I  had  never  seen  it  rain  before, 
except  once  in  the  jungles  of  the  Far  East.  Perhaps  the  most  surprising 
part  of  the  whole  episode  was  the  much  greater  fear  of  the  elements 
shown  by  these  children  of  the  wilderness  than  was  our  own.  The 
superiority  of  savages  in  struggles  with  nature,  as  compared  with 
civilized  man,  is  all  very  w^ell  in  popular  novels,  but  my  own  experience 
has  been  that  in  real  life  the  balance  tips  the  other  way. 

Evidently  the  sources  of  the  Suwara-auru  were  so  far  up  in  the 
mountains  that  it  did  not  respond  to  the  rains  as  quickly  as  the  other 
streams ;  and  a  day  or  two  later  it  might  have  been  quite  as  impassable 
as  it  is  by  reputation. 

On  the  opposite  bank  was  an  immense  rock  with  a  sheer  side  up 
which  we  could  never  have  pulled  the  horses,  even  had  we  succeeded 
in  getting  that  far  with  them.  Yet  their  loss  on  the  trail  would  not 
have  made  Flart  any  poorer,  for  when  he  returned  one  had  died  of 
snake-bite  and  the  other  had  injured  itself  so  badly  that  it  had  to  be 
killed.  We  coaxed  the  worn  and  frightened  Indians  under  their 
packs  again  and  pushed  on  in  the  drenching  roar.  For  an  hour  or 
more  we  plunged  on  through  dense  forest ;  then,  as  the  nose  of  the 
mountain  we  were  flanking  receded,  the  rain  decreased  and  at  length 
subsided  almost  to  a  drizzle,  though  the  rest  of  the  day  was  bathed 
in  successive  showers.  Having  flanked  the  range,  our  trail  now  turned 
more  to  the  east  and  came  out  on  swampy  scrub  savannah  again. 
All  day  it  had  been  barely  a  foot  wide,  and  so  seldom  was  it  traveled, 
even  by  animals,  perhaps  not  in  months  by  a  human  being,  as  to  be 
almost  invisible,  except  where  it  was  deep  enough  to  be  filled  with 
water.  But  that  was  not  the  worst  of  it.  Lack  of  travel  had  let 
the  long,  sharp  prairie-grass  grow  out  over  the  path  from  both  sides 
so  as  almost  to  cover  it,  and  the  saw-  and  razor-edges  of  this  cut  and 
gashed  my  bare  feet  until  the  tops  of  them  were  a  mosquito-net  of 
bleeding  scratches. 

We  expected  to  get  a  welcome  and  a  plentiful  meal  that  evening 


STRUGGLING  DOWN  TO  GEORGETOWN  515 

in  "George's  Village,"  a  small  settlement  since  the  oldest  foreign 
resident  could  remember,  of  which  "George"  was  the  Indian  chief. 
Life  itself  depended  on  the  food  and  supplies  we  were  to  get  there. 
Our  feelings  may  easily  be  imagined,  tlierefore,  when  we  came  in. 
sight  of  the  village  and  found  it  only  half  a  dozen  i)atches  of  charred 
timbers  and  broken  pots,  even  the  heavy  red-wood  uprights  that  would 
not  burn  having  been  cut  down.  It  turned  out  tliat  "George"  had 
recently  died,  though  news  is  so  sluggish  in  this  region  that  few- 
knew  it.  In  much  of  tropical  South  America  it  is  the  custom,  upon 
the  death  of  a  chief,  to  burn  down  his  house,  or  even  the  whole 
village,  after  burying  him  in  and  under  the  hammock  in  which  he  has 
died,  and  then  to  abandon  the  locality  to  escape  the  "evil  spirit"  that 
has  killed  him.  For  no  Indian  of  these  regions  ever  dies  a  natural 
death.  He  is  always  killed  by  some  supernatural  spirit.  "Did  the 
spirit  hurt  him  much?"  the  civilized  man  will  ask  the  Indian  informant. 
"Why,  he  broke  every  bone  in  his  body,"  the  Indian  will  answer — no 
doubt  because  of  the  limpness  of  the  corpse. 

Miles  farther  on,  across  another  thigh-wearying  swamp,  we  sighted 
a  cluster  of  huts,  and  our  spirits  rose,  only  to  fall  again,  for  these, 
too,  had  been  abandoned,  though  not  burned.  There  were  half  a 
dozen  of  them,  including  two  large  ones  of  oval  shape  made  entirely 
of  thatch  palm,  except  the  rounded  ends,  which  had  been  plastered 
■with  mud.  I  arrived  with  a  tooth-rattling  chill,  but  our  Indians  had 
faded  away  behind  us  and  we  had  no  dry  clothing,  I  stripped  naked 
and  rubbed  down  with  my  wet  garments,  that  being  at  least  prefer- 
able to  standing  in  them  in  the  penetrating  chill  of  evening.  We  forced 
the  door  of  the  largest  hut,  which  was  no  great  task,  and  found  it  a 
single  room  large  enough  for  fifty  men,  but  chiefly  full  of  emptiness. 
The  only  things  left  were  some  cracked  water-gourds  and  a  few 
woven  palm-leaf  fire- fans,  scattered  over  a  broad  expanse  of  hard, 
uneven  earth  floor.  When  the  carriers  at  last  arrived,  we  built  a  fagot 
fire  inside,  swung  our  hammocks,  and  made  tea  of  swamp-  and  rain- 
water with  which  to  w-ash  down  our  dry  farinha,  wondering  the  while 
what  we  would  live  on  ahead.  The  old  man  was  shivering  with  fever, 
and  we  feared  he  would  not  last  much  longer,  even  if  both  did  not 
refuse  to  go  any  farther.  They  swung  their  hammocks  side  by  side 
at  some  distance  from  ours  and  built  another  fire  between  them,  which 
the  youth  kept  going  all  night.  Whenever  they  had  occasion  to  go  out- 
side they  went  only  in  close  compan}',  like  children  afraid  of  the  dark. 
The  hut  had  no  windows,  and  both  doors  were  closed  against  insects. 


5i6  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

night  air,  and  evil  spirits.  Yet  the  mosquitoes  and  gnats  were  so 
numerous  that  I  used  my  mosquitcro  for  the  first  time  since  buying  it 
in  Manaos.  Also  the  tiny  nnicuim,  or  "red  bug,"  crawled  up  from 
tHe  floor  and  bit  our  legs  fiercely. 

The  moment  I  saw  the  darkness  begin  to  gray  through  the  many 
lapses  in  the  grass  wall  I  tumbled  out  and  aroused  the  others.  Hart 
and  I  had  tea  and  dry  farinha,  but  the  carriers  only  the  latter,  for 
they  did  not  "know"  tea  and  preferred  to  breakfast  on  mandioca  meal 
alone.  Our  great  difficulty  now  was  to  get  them  not  to  abandon  us. 
They  had  agreed  to  carry  our  stuff  only  to  "George's  Village,"  and 
now  insisted  on  returning.  They  were  at  the  outskirts  of  the  Macuxy 
tribe,  and  to  go  farther  was  to  run  the  risk  that  their  enemies,  the 
Wapushanas,  would  "blow  on  them" — not  in  the  Bowery  sense,  but 
in  correct  English — and  thereby  cast  a  spell  over  or  an  evil  spirit  into 
them  which  would  cause  them  to  die  soon  after  they  reached  home. 
It  is  likely  that  the  superstition  comes  from  the  former  custom  of 
using  blow-guns  with  poisoned  arrows.  The  Wapushanas  take  up 
all  the  southern  end  of  British  Guiana  and  once  fiercely  warred  against 
the  neighboring  tribes ;  and  though  they  rarely  resort  to  violence  now, 
the  younger  generation,  being  meek  and  unwarlike,  thanks  largely 
to  the  man  we  were  trying  to  reach,  the  ancient  enmities  remain  and 
members  of  one  tribe  rarely  enter  the  territory  of  the  other  for  fear 
of  being  "blown  on."  We  had  the  one  weapon  of  refusing  to  pay 
them  anything  if  they  left  us  in  the  lurch,  which  was  not  a  particularly 
powerful  one.  Luckily,  the  youth  had  made  one  trip  to  IManaos  and 
had  not  only  learned  enough  Portuguese  so  that  I  could  talk  to  him, 
but  had  dulled  the  edge  of  his  superstitions,  which  eventually  brought 
him  on  our  side  against  his  father.  But  all  this  would  have  been  inade- 
quate without  the  most  powerful  aid  of  all,  the  white  man's  will-power, 
which,  when  brought  into  conflict  with  that  of  the  aborigines,  wilt 
almost  always  win  out,  if  one  has  patience.  For  will-power,  whether 
over  fear  or  in  argument,  is  rarely  strong  among  savages. 

Having  lost  two  hours  in  discussion,  therefore,  our  caravan  got 
under  way  again.  Hart  and  I,  knowing  a  long  and  hungry  day  was  be- 
fore us,  setting  a  sharp  pace.  Swamps  began  again  at  once,  and 
more  than  half  the  day's  walk  was  under  water,  from  ankle-  to  chest- 
deep.  In  time  this  weighed  so  heavily  on  the  thighs  and  the  small  of 
the  back  that  they  ached  severely.  The  razor-like  prairie-grass  was 
almost  incessant,  even  under  water,  and  a  tiny  twig,  thorny  and  sharp 
as  0  keyhole  saw,  hung  everywhere  across  the  faint  path.     In  con- 


STRUGGLING  DOWN  TO  GEORGETOWN  517 

sequence,  the  tops  of  my  feet  were  virtually  flayed  and  every  step 
was  more  painful  than  the  last.  Yet  we  could  not  have  worn  our 
shoes,  for  that  would  have  been  to  lift  some  twenty  pounds  of  water 
with  every  step.  Rain  began  again  almost  as  soon  as  we  started, 
and  kept  up  all  the  morning.  The  worry  about  my  baggage  was  con- 
stant, for  in  it  was  nearly  all  I  possessed,  including  twenty  pounds 
in  gold,  and  the  will-power  by  which  we  had  forced  the  Indians  to 
continue  might  lose  its  strength,  once  they  were  out  of  our  sight.  Yet 
they  could  or  would  not  keep  up  with  us.  If  we  waited  for  them,  they 
grew  slower  and  slower;  if  we  took  our  own  pace,  we  were  soon  out 
of  sight  of  them,  and  I  at  least  expected  them  to  drop  the  stuff  in  the 
trail  and  flee  from  the  "blowing"  Wapushanas.  Yet  as  between  having 
to  sleep  out  here  on  the  flooded  savannahs  without  food  and  losing  a 
few  paltry  possessions,  there  was  only  one  choice.  So  after  several 
delays  on  a  day  when  delay  might  be  serious,  until  we  caught  another 
glimpse  of  two  specks  crawling  along  across  the  vast,  scrub-wooded 
plains  behind,  as  hard  to  see  as  an  animal  of  protective  coloring,  we 
strode  unhesitatingly  on.  By  and  by  we  came  to  some  of  the  undula- 
tions of  the  Kanukus,  hard  and  stony  ridges  that  were  torture  to 
our  feet,  yet  these  were  now  so  swollen  that  it  would  have  been 
worse  torture  to  put  on  our  shoes.  Down  in  a  rocky  hollow  called 
the  "Point  of  the  Alountains"  we  managed  to  build  a  fire  of  wet 
wood,  but  waited  in  vain  for  our  Indians.  When  we  felt  sure  for 
the  tenth  time  that  they  had  abandoned  us,  they  came  snailing  over  the 
rise  behind  us  and  dropped  down  as  if  utterly  exhausted.  We  divided 
with  them  the  handful  of  farinha  left,  and  took  a  long  time  to  coax 
them  to  their  feet  again.  Swamps  disagreeably  alternated  with  stony 
patches.  A  hill  in  the  blue  distance  was  still  three  miles  short  of  our 
goal.  The  sun  came  out  for  the  first  time  in  three  days  and  quickly 
added  sunburn  and  stiflfness  to  our  other  troubles.  The  country  was 
faintly  rolling  in  places,  and  on  the  tops  of  slight  ridges  between  lake- 
like  swamps  we  glanced  back,  but  though  our  carriers  had  disappeared 
from  the  landscape,  we  dared  not  halt.  Hart  assured  me  they  would 
not  abandon  the  stuff,  and  that  if  they  did,  it  would  sit  safely  ori  the 
trail,  even  in  the  unlikely  event  of  anyone  else  traveling  this  route 
at  this  season,  until  other  Indians  were  sent  for  it ;  but  I  had  not  so 
high  a  faith  in  human  virtue. 

In  mid-afternoon  we  sighted  the  Rupununi,  a  branch  of  the  Esse- 
quibo  River  that  is  the  chief  outlet  to  the  coast ;  but  Alelville  lived 
ten  miles  upstream,  and  the  trail  was  almost  completely  lost  on  these 


5i8  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

deeply  flooded  savannahs.  This  greatly  increased  the  chances  of 
losing  our  baggage,  for  the  carriers,  being  in  enemy  territory  where 
they  had  never  ventured  before,  could  only  guess  at  the  road,  while 
their  fear  of  being  "blown  on"  would  be  greatly  increased  by  our 
absence.  We  struggled  on  through  swamps  and  rocky  spurs  of 
hills,  straining  our  thighs  and  backs  against  water  made  doubly  bur- 
densome in  many  places  by  bogs  and  mud.  I  seemed  to  be  lifting  a  ton 
with  every  step,  yet  we  were  forced  to  make  wide  detours.  Several 
times  I  reached  what  I  thought  was  the  point  of  exhaustion,  yet  kept 
on  by  force  of  will,  that  determination  which  Indians  and  other  primi- 
tive peoples  lack  in  comparison  with  the  white  man,  because  it  is 
allied  to  reason.  Toward  sunset  we  came  upon  the  first  footprints  we 
had  seen  in  two  days,  during  which  the  only  signs  of  life  had  been  the 
birds  and  a  scattered  herd  of  half-wild  cattle.  A  line  of  trees  ahead 
showed  the  edge  of  the  Rupununi,  which  we  could  not  pass,  even  in 
a  boat,  if  we  arrived  there  after  dark.  Just  at  dusk  we  reached  an 
Indian  hut  on  the  bank,  and  even  before  we  asked  for  it  a  woman 
brought  us  a  bowl  of  farinha  wet  with  cold  water,  which  we  gulped 
down  like  starved  savages.  This  quickly  put  new  kick  into  our  legs. 
But  there  was  no  boat  on  this  side  of  the  river,  now  miles  wide  and 
covering  a  large  forest.  An  Indian  youth  climbed  to  the  top  of  a 
tree  and  hallooed  a  peculiar  musical  call  and  the  most  pleasant  sound 
I  had  heard  in  a  long  time  was  a  faint  answering  hail.  I  fired  my 
revolver  to  suggest  the  presence  of  white  men,  and  by  and  by,  after 
we  had  several  times  given  up  hope,  there  grew  out  of  the  night  the 
peculiar  thump-thump  of  paddles  against  a  boat,  common  to  all 
Amazonia,  and  then  the  voices  of  the  paddlers  fighting  against  the 
forest.  At  last  there  crept  out  of  the  flooded  tree-tops  a  large  canoe 
manned  by  four  Indians,  with  a  negro  boy  of  West  Indian  speech  in 
the  stern.  His  was  the  first  native  English  I  had  heard  in  the 
colony.  We  had  crossed  the  divide  between  the  Brazilian  and  the 
Guianese  river  systems. 

The  paddlers  were  a  long  hour  fighting  the  trees  and  recrossing  the 
swift  river,  born  barely  thirty  miles  above  in  the  high  forest  and 
rising  and  falling  many  feet  in  a  single  day ;  but  we  were  finally  wel- 
comed by  Commissioner  Melville  in  the  best  house  I  had  seen  since 
leaving  Manaos,  and  I  dropped  into  my  first  "Berbice  chair,"  joy- 
fully stretching  my  weary  legs  out  on  the  long  folding  arms  of  it. 
Two-story  houses  are  rare  sights  in  these  parts,  but  here  was  one  with 
good  hardwood  floors  and  all  reasonable  conveniences,  of  open  bunga- 


STRUGGLING  DOWN  TO  GEORGETOWN  5^9 

low  build  and  covered  with  "shacks" — that  is,  untapered  singles  split 
with  a  "cutlass,"  or  machete — the  servant  quarters,  kitchen,  dining- 
and  store-rooms  below,  and  a  real  white-man's  home  above.  We 
were  loaned  dry  clothing  and  given  a  mammoth  supper,  which  left  mc 
highly  contented  with  life,  even  though  all  I  had  left  in  South  America 
was  a  soaked  revolver  and  kodak  and  thirty  pounds  in  five-pound 
bank-notes  in  an  oilcloth  pouch  about  my  neck.  I  painted  my  feet 
with  iodine,  but  could  not  wash  them,  though  they  were  grimy  and 
black  as  those  of  any  Indian  w^ho  had  never  known  shoes.  Then  we 
swung  our  hammocks  in  the  "guest-house,"  a  bungalow  on  stilts  a  fev/ 
yards  from  the  main  building,  and  were  heard  no  more  until  late  the 
next  morning. 

All  that  day  I  hobbled  about  barefoot,  as  was  every  person  in  the 
region.  To  my  astonishment  and  delight  our  Indians  walked  in  to- 
ward noon  with  our  baggage,  though  most  of  it  was  dripping,  and  even 
my  indispensable  kodak-tank,  made  of  flimsy  materials  evidently  stuck 
together  with  flour  paste,  after  the  hasty  American  manner,  had  fallen 
apart  and  warped  out  of  shape.  The  bank-notes  about  my  neck  had 
been  soaked,  too,  and  had  run  with  color  until  they  were  all  but  il- 
legible. I  spread  them  out  in  the  sun  to  dry  with  the  rest  of  my 
belongings,  much  more  pleased  to  have  water-soaked  possessions  than 
none  at  all.  To  the  Indians  I  gave  a  gold  sovereign,  an  exceedingly 
high  reward  for  the  region,  where  the  white  settlers  pay  native  carriers 
three  or  four  shillings  for  such  a  trip ;  but  my  generosity  did  them 
little  good,  for  JMelville's  half-Indian  son  took  the  coin,  to  which  the 
Indians  seemed  to  attach  little  value,  and  gave  them  each  five  yards 
of  cotton  cloth  for  it.  The  unadvised  traveler  cannot  know  until  he 
gets  there  that  what  he  should  have  brought  to  interior  British  Guiana 
is  not  money  but  goods. 

Melville  was  an  Englishman  born  in  Jamaica,  of  good  family  and 
well  educated.  Some  thirty  years  before,  in  his  early  manhood,  he 
had  come  to  British  Guiana,  soon  striking  out  for  the  then  unknown 
savannah.  Here  he  had  lived  for  fifteen  years  without  a  single  civil- 
ized neighbor,  often  unable  for  a  year  at  a  time  to  hold  communica- 
tion with  the  coast.  He  spoke  the  native  tongue  so  well  that  he  was 
now  an  authority  on  it,  even  among  the  Indians,  with  whom  he  ranked 
as  the  "Big  Chief."  No  white  w^oman  had  ever  yet  been  in  this  region, 
nor,  until  recently,  anyone  with  authority  to  perform  marriages,  so 
that  the  exiled  Englishman  could  only  seek  companionship  among  the 
Indians.      Of    the  several   mothers   of   his    children,    none   had   ever 


520  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

spoken  English,  but  the  children  themselves  had  been  sent  to  school 
not  only  in  Georgetown,  but  in  England.  John,  the  oldest,  was  a 
well-built  man  in  the  early  twenties,  as  much  Indian  as  Briton  in 
manners  and  features,  speaking  his  fluent  English  with  a  West  Indi- 
an or  Eurasian  twist.  All  except  this  young  man  and  a  little  girl  of 
three  were  away  at  school.  John  gave  the  impression  of  being  an 
improvement  on  the  native  stock,  but  his  father,  who  was  in  a  posi- 
tion to  know,  said  it  was  his  experience  that  there  is  no  essential 
difference  between  an  Indian  and  a  half-Indian.  Melville  uncon- 
sciously had  come  to  treat  his  women  much  as  the  Indians  treat 
theirs,  with  a  sort  of  servant-like  indifference.  The  latest  one  he 
always  referred  to  as  "my  cook,"  and  even  then  not  unnecessarily, 
leaving  her  in  her  place  below  stairs,  never  unkind  to  her,  yet  never 
treating  her  as  an  equal. 

Melville  was  a  remarkable  and  rare  example  of  a  white  man  who 
has  spent  most  of  his  life  alone  in  the  tropics  without  letting  himself 
go  to  seed.  Not  only  that,  but  he  had  made  his  isolation  an  oppor- 
tunity to  improve  himself,  until  his  mind  was  as  keen,  his  will  as  firm, 
and  his  interests  as  wide  as  the  best  of  his  race  living  in  civilization — 
with  an  added  something  of  New  World  initiative  which  the  average 
Englishman  does  not  develop  at  home.  With  a  large  library  on  all 
subjects,  considerably  traveled  in  Europe  and  the  United  States,  and 
apparently  gifted  wnth  a  remarkable  memory,  he  had  a  veritable 
fund  of  sound,  thorough,  and  ever-ready  information  about  all  parts 
of  the  earth  and  all  the  activities  of  mankind,  and  was  practiced  in 
everything  from  photography  to  astronomy,  from  medicine  to  British 
law.  His  isolation  seemed  to  have  rid  him  of  the  common  trait  of 
superficiality,  and  as  soon  as  he  found  interest  in,  or  reason  to  know, 
anything,  he  went  at  once  to  the  bottom  of  it  and  did  not  stop  until 
he  had  every  detail  at  his  tongue's  end.  He  spoke  Portuguese  as 
well  as  Wapushana,  and  was  plainly  a  man  equally  at  home  bare- 
footed among  Indians  or  silk-hatted  in  London.  Naturally,  having 
lived  nearly  all  his  life  among  inferiors,  Indians,  negroes,  and  his 
own  half-breed  children,  he  had  grown  assertive,  but  his  information 
was  so  wide,  exact,  and  fluent  that  his  dogmatism  was  rarely  op- 
pressive. 

A  generation  before,  he  had  found  the  Indians  of  the  interior  all 
"blow-gun  men,"  every  man  and  boy  carrying  a  long  reed  tube,  a 
quiver  of  arrows,  and  the  lovv'er  jaw  of  the  fish  known  as  pirainha. 
The  arrows  were  made  of  the  midrib  of  the  large  leaf  of  the  carua 


STRUGGLING  DOWN  TO  GEORGETOWN  521 

palm,  were  pointed  by  drawing  them  between  the  razor-like  teeth  of 
the  tibh-jaw,  made  poisonous  with  iirali,  and  notched  in  such  a  way 
that  the  point  broke  off  in  the  victim  and  the  arrow  itself  could  be 
repointed  and  used  again.  Urali,  obtained  from  a  tree  up  in  the 
Kanuku  hills,  acts  on  the  nerves  governing  respiration  and  kills  simply 
by  halting  the  lung  action,  without  poisoning  the  flesh  of  the  victim. 
If  respiration  can  be  kept  up  artificially  until  the  poison  has  run  its 
course,  death  does  not  result.  It  is  rarely  fatal  to  salt-eating  white 
men,  and  can  be  cured  by  rubbing  salt  on  the  wound  at  once.  Mel- 
ville had  tried  some  of  the  arrow-points  as  phonograph  needles  and 
found  them  excellent,  eliminating  all  harshness  and  giving  the  illusion 
of  distance.  Gradually  he  had  broken  the  Indians  of  the  blow-gun 
custom,  so  that  now  only  a  few  old  Indians  know  how  to  prepare  the 
poison.  He  had  long  been  accepted  as  the  chief  of  all  the  tribes  of 
the  region,  who  have  become  so  meek  under  this  single-handed  British 
rule  that  they  now  obey  even  a  negro.  Either  Melville  or  his  Scotch 
assistant  and  deputy  had  only  to  drop  in  at  a  village,  call  some  In- 
dian aside,  and  talk  to  him  a  few  moments  in  a  confidential  tone  to 
have  him  accepted  as  chief  by  all  the  rest,  who  thereafter  took  through 
him  all  orders  from  the  government  by  way  of  Melville. 

The  Macuxys  and  Wapushanas  (or  "Wapusianas")  are,  according 
to  this  authority,  roughly  of  the  Carib  and  the  Arawak  families  re- 
spectively, with  different  linguistic  roots,  the  former  being  cannibals 
up  to  a  generation  or  two  ago.  The  two  tribes  have  always  been 
enemies,  with  little  in  common,  and  habitually  regard  each  other  with 
aversion.  The  Wapushanas,  in  particular,  are  fatalists  of  passive 
demeanor.  As  an  example  our  host  mentioned  the  case  of  an  Indian 
who  had  recently  walked  in  upon  another,  lolling  in  his  hammock,  and 
announced  in  a  conversational  tone,  "I  have  come  to  kill  you."  "Verj- 
well,"  said  the  other,  throwing  the  two  sides  of  the  hammock  over 
his  face  and  allowing  himself  to  be  killed  without  making  the  slightest 
resistance.  The  religion  of  the  Indiaiis  Melville  had  found  entirely 
negative.  They  believe  the  Good  Spirit  will  never  do  anything  but 
good,  hence  give  all  their  attention  to  placating  the  evil  spirits,  swarm- 
ing everywhere,  even  in  various  pools  of  the  rivers,  which  boats  must 
therefore  avoid.  They  call  the  rainy  season  the  "Boia-assu,"  or  "Big 
Snake,"  because  the  constellation  we  know  as  the  Scorpion  and  they 
as  the  "large  serpent"  is  then  in  the  ascendancy. 

When  he  planned  to  leave  the  region  to  return  to  civilization  some 
years  before,   the   government   had   induced    Melville   to    remain,  by 


522  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

certain  concessions,  including  his  appointment  as  commissioner  for  all 
the  Rupununi  district,  so  that  now  he  was  virtually  the  whole  British 
Empire  in  the  very  sparsely  inhabited  southern  half  of  the  colony, 
being  deputy  chief  of  police,  deputy  customs  inspector,  deputy  judge 
trying  all  cases  in  the  back  end  of  the  country,  and  deputy  almost 
anything  one  could  name.  A  most  earnest  and  efficient  government 
officer  he  was,  too,  one  of  the  few  who  rule  well  in  the  wilds  without 
constant  supervision  and  overseeing.  He  was  the  only  man,  also,  who 
owned  land  in  the  far  interior,  another  concession  wrung  from  the 
unwilling  government.  The  latter  prefers  that  the  territory  remain 
crown  land,  so  that  the  College  of  Reisers  or  Court  of  Policy,  mainly 
made  up  of  dark-complexioned  natives,  cannot  interfere  with  it.  His 
homelike  dwellings  overlooked  what  would  be  broad  acres  again  as 
soon  as  the  immense  lake  covering  all  the  surrounding  region  subsided, 
with  a  golf  links  and  half  the  sweep  of  the  horizon  beautified  by  blue 
range  behind  range  of  hills,  the  nearest  peak  four  miles  away,  the 
others  isolated  mounds  and  hillocks  scattered  across  the  bushy  but 
splendid  grazing  plains  to  far-off  Mt.  Roraima,  highest  in  the  colony. 
When  we  arrived  the  houses  were  on  an  island  in  a  vast  lake  extending 
in  all  directions,  with  here  and  there  the  tops  of  trees  appearing  above 
it  and  the  huts  of  most  of  the  Indians  inundated.  Next  morning  more 
than  half  the  lake  had  disappeared,  and  the  river,  which  had 
been  completely  lost  in  the  inundation,  so  that  thirty  hours  before  a 
boat  could  travel  miles  beyond  it  on  either  side,  now  showed  ten  feet 
of  sheer  bank.  Nowhere  have  I  ever  seen  water  rise  and  subside  with 
such  rapidity. 

We  were  still  in  the  Land  of  Uncertainty.  Melville  expected  any 
day  a  cargo-boat  he  had  sent  down  to  Georgetown  months  before, 
bringing  him  orders  to  go  down  a  few  days  later ;  but  though  it  might 
arrive  to-morrow,  it  might  also  not  be  here  in  a  month.  It  would  have 
been  a  great  advantage  to  continue  my  journey  in  a  covered,  well 
stocked  government  boat,  with  the  greatest  authority  in  southern 
British  Guiana.  When  several  days  had  passed  without  any  news  of 
the  expected  craft,  however,  I  decided  to  push  on  alone,  and  Melville 
loaned  me  the  only  boat  available — a  fairly  large  but  very  ancient, 
worm-eaten  dugout,  with  the  usual  submerged  gunwales  protected 
by  boards  nailed  along  the  sides,  through  which  water  seeped  con- 
stantly. With  this  he  let  me  have  a  tarpaulin  to  cover  the  baggage 
by  day  and  serve  as  a  tent  by  night,  a  lantern,  and  necessary  eating 
utensils,  all  of  which,  with  the  boat,  I  was  to  leave  at  the  mouth  of 


STRUGGLING  DOWN  TO  GEORGETOWN  523 

the  Rupununi  for  his  men  to  bring  back  with  them.  In  liis  combined 
capacity  as  the  government  of  the  southern  end  of  the  colony,  the  com- 
missioner required  me  to  fulfill  all  legal  formalities,  writing  out  a 
detailed  account  of  my  arrival  in  the  colony  and  an  explanation  of 
-why  I  carried  a  revolver  and  how  many  cartridges  I  had.  The  onus 
for  this  I  put  on  the  Brazilians,  rather  than  imply  that  they  might  be 
needed  in  so  modelly  governed  a  country  as  British  Guiana,  and 
formally  asked  permission  to  "carry  them  through  the  colony."  In 
reply,  the  one-man  government  examined  my  belongings,  gave  me  an 
official  letter  saying  I  had  reported  to  the  constituted  authorities,  had 
been  found  harmless  and  in  proper  form,  and  need  not  be  waylaid  and 
•examined  by  officials  along  the  way,  issued  me  a  license  to  carry  a 
revolver,  gave  me  an  unofficial  sealed  letter  to  the  governor,  which  no 
doubt  contained  private  opinions  as  to  the  reasons  for  my  existence, 
and  finally,  inasmuch  as  I  was  "going  down  to  town"  anyway,  in- 
trusted to  me  several  letters  on  official  business,  so  that  I  was  raised 
to  the  dignity  of  being  "On  His  Majesty's  Service." 

All  this  took  time,  and  even  then  I  could  not  go  without  supplies, 
but  must  wait  until  they  rounded  up  and  killed  a  steer,  sixty  pounds 
of  which  w^as  cut  into  large  slices  and  packed  in  a  drygoods  box, 
with  salt  between,  while  every  living  carnivorous  creature  in  the 
vicinity  gorged  himself  on  the  rest  of  the  carcass.  A  half-bushel 
basket  of  farinha,  a  can  of  matches,  and  two  novels  completed  my 
outfit.  All  this  was  piled  on  saplings  laid  across  the  bottom  in  the  cen- 
ter of  the  boat  and  covered  with  the  tarpaulin.  Our  two  Indians  had 
not  the  slightest  desire  in  the  world  to  be  transformed  from  carriers 
into  paddlers,  but  preferred  to  go  directly  home  as  fast  as  their  now 
restored  legs  could  carry  them.  But  a  judicious  mixture  of  moral 
suasion  and  enlarging  upon  the  danger  of  being  "blown  on"  if  they 
traveled  alone  finally  caused  them  to  agree  to  go  as  far  as  the  Prot- 
estant mission  on  the  Yupucari,  which  was  really  nearer  their  own 
and  from  which  Hart  would  return  w'ith  them. 

Several  days  after  our  arrival,  therefore,  we  were  oH  down  a  much 
swollen  and  hence  swift  river  that  carried  us,  without  seeing  them, 
over  what  most  of  the  year  were  rapids  with  laborious  portages  and 
waterfalls,  that  were  now  only  ripples  and  small  whirlpools  through 
which  we  raced  at  express  speed.  Hart  and  I,  and  a  negro  boy 
loaned  us  as  guide  through  the  first  nine  miles  of  rapids,  sat  in  the 
stern,  and  our  metamorphosed  carriers  steadily  plied  their  paddles  in 
the  bow.    There  was  a  strip  of  forest  along  the  bank,  but  sometimes 


524  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

only  the  tips  of  the  trees  were  visible  above  the  flooded  savannah. 
At  ten  o'clock  we  stopped  to  cook  beef  and  to  exchange  the  negro 
boy,  who  was  to  walk  home,  for  "Solomon,"  an  Indian  chief  and 
henchman  of  Melville's,  and  the  first  aboriginal  South  American  I 
ever  met  who  spoke  any  considerable  amount  of  English.  We  dropped 
him  a  few  miles  farther  down,  past  what  in  the  dry  season  would 
have  been  half  a  day  of  portaging.  Travel  and  commerce  in  this 
region,  I  reflected,  are  about  what  they  were  in  all  the  world  before 
the  age  of  money;  it  was  not  only  like  going  back  to  nature,  but  back 
to  the  Stone  Age.  There  was  a  good  breeze,  though  not  enough  to 
drive  off  the  clouds  of  puims  or  jcjcnes,  here  simply  called  ''gnats," 
which  seemed  a  weak  term  for  those  almost  invisible  pests  with  a 
bite  that  leaves  a  torturing  red  itch  for  a  week  afterward.  Some  name 
with  a  wide  blue  border  would  have  been  more  appropriate. 

We  skirted  close  to  the  densely  wooded  Kanuku  Mountains,  now 
and  then  glimpsing  a  small  monkey  and  a  few  birds,  but  otherwise 
finding  nothing  except  insects  and  primeval  solitude.  About  four 
o'clock  we  began  to  look  for  a  place  to  land,  cook  supper,  and  camp, 
but  this  was  by  no  means  so  easy  as  it  sounds.  The  banks  consisted 
of  unbroken  forest  with  little  more  than  the  tops  of  the  trees  above 
water  and  Avith  no  signs  of  land,  the  swift  current  making  a  halt  doubly 
difficult.  We  did,  however,  finally  drag  ourselves  up  to  a  bit  of  ele- 
vated ground,  where  the  jungle  was  so  thick  there  was  barely  room 
for  all  of  us  to  stand,  to  say  nothing  of  lying  down.  Moreover,  it 
seemed  a  pity  to  lose  the  swift,  rapid-defying  current  that  might  be 
gone  by  morning,  so  after  building  a  fire  of  green  wood  with  great 
difficuhy  and  roasting  a  few  slabs  of  beef,  we  decided  to  travel  until 
an  hour  or  two  after  dark.  We  probably  never  will  again.  The  plan 
would  have  been  all  right  had  there  been  landing-places;  but  sur- 
rounded on  both  sides  by  an  absolutely  unbroken  forest-jungle  without 
a  foot  of  land  above  water,  except  far  back  among  the  flooded  tree-tops 
where  we  could  not  penetrate,  we  soon  found  ourselves  in  a  precarious 
situation.  The  stars  were  out,  but  there  was  no  moon  and  a  suggestion 
of  mist,  so  that  the  darkness  seemed  a  solid  wall  on  either  side  of  us. 
Only  with  the  greatest  difficulty  could  we  see  the  river  ahead  or  tell 
the  shadows  from  the  trees,  and  we  were  constantly  on  the  point  of 
smashing  full-tilt  into  some  snag  or  submerged  tree-trunk  that  might 
easily  have  sunk  the  boat  and  all  it  contained,  leaving  us  floundering 
in  the  trackless  forest-sea. 

Toward  midnight  we  decided  we  must  get  a  ifit  of  rest  somehow, 


STRUGGLING  DOWN  TO  GEORGETOWN  525 

and  in  the  black  darkness,  increased  by  gathering  storm  clouds,  we 
shot  for  the  bank  and  grasped  wildly  at  the  endless,  impenetrable 
forest-jungle  as  the  river  tore  us  past  it  at  boat-smashing  speed.  The 
stupidity  and  fear  of  our  Indians  made  the  task  doubly  difficult.  Sev- 
eral times  we  clutched  at  the  slashing  branches  and  tried  to  drag 
ourselves  far  enough  into  the  flooded  forest  to  get  out  of  the  current, 
for  there  was  no  hope  of  getting  land  under  our  feet;  but  each  time 
we  had  to  give  up  and  tear  on  down  the  river,  to  risk  all  our  pos- 
sessions, if  not  life  itself,  by  trying  again.  It  was  like  attempting  to 
catch  an  express  train  on  the  fly.  In  one  such  effort  we  smashed  into 
a  great  tangle  of  immense  branches  through  wdiich  the  water  tore 
and  dragged  us  until  we  were  certain  the  boat  would  be  knocked  to 
pieces,  or  at  least  that  some  refugee  snake  would  drop  upon  us.  Some- 
how we  got  through  this,  only  to  strike  instantly  a  whirlpool  that 
sent  us  spinning  into  the  tops  of  several  more  trees  out  in  what 
seemed  to  be  the  middle  of  the  stream. 

Then,  unexpectedly,  we  struck  a  sluggish  corner  and  were  half  an 
hour  dragging  ourselves  in  among  the  bushes.  Once  fire-ants  drove 
us  out,  swiftly.  Finally  we  tied  up  to  a  branch,  from  others  of  which 
I  managed  to  hang  our  hammocks  while  Hart  steered  the  craft  in  and 
out  among  the  tops  of  the  submerged  trees.  His  own  hung  over  the 
boat,  but  mine  was  far  out  from  it,  with  no  one  knew  how  many 
fathoms  of  water  beneath  me  and  splendid  chances  of  falling  out 
among  pirainhas,  if  not  alligators.  Should  the  water  recede  during 
the  night,  we  might  be  left  a  hundred  feet  or  more  aloft. 

The  old  Indian  threw  himself  down  on  the  cargo ;  the  young  one 
squatted  out  the  night  in  the  boat,  bailing  it  occasionally.  All  night 
long  an  awful  roaring  came  from  off  in  the  forest,  a  sound  with  which 
there  is  none  to  compare,  though  an  enormous  engine  blowing  off 
steam  in  short  blasts,  or  an  immense  multitude  of  insane  people  scream- 
ing at  some  little  distance  might  faintly  suggest  it.  It  came  from 
howling  monkeys,  black  apes  about  half  the  size  of  a  man,  according 
to  Hart,  who  insisted  that  there  was  only  one  of  them,  though  it 
sounded  like  at  least  a  hundred  in  angry  chorus.  Everything  portended 
an  all-night  downpour  to  add  to  our  pleasures,  but  this  did  not  come 
until  the  first  peep  of  gray,  just  as  we  had  gotten  our  hammocks  down 
and  stowed  away  under  the  tarpaulin.  Then  a  roaring  deluge,  cold 
as  ice-water,  drenched  us  in  an  instant ;  but  we  could  only  sit  and 
paddle  and  take  it  hour  after  hour.  There  was  room  for  one  of  us 
under  the  tarpaulin,  but  that  would  have  been  selfish  to  the  other. 


526  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

The  rain  beat  so  hard  on  the  surface  of  the  water  that  thousands  of 
little  fountains  sprang  upward  under  the  impact.  As  it  showed  no 
signs  of  let-up,  we  decided  we  must  build  a  fire  and  get  something  hot 
down  our  throats  before  we  froze  or  shook  ourselves  to  death.  We 
grasped  a  piece  of  overhanging  bank,  which  luckily  did  not  pull 
loose  and  drop  us  into  the  racing  stream,  and  dragged  ourselves 
ashore.  There  was  barely  standing-room  for  the  four  of  us,  huddled 
and  streaming  in  the  pouring  rain,  the  teeth  of  all  chattering  audibly. 
It  was  then  that  Hart  and  I  broached  the  bottle  of  Dutch  rum  from 
Curasao.  It  would  have  given  us  exquisite  pleasure  to  have  let  a 
prohibitionist  stand  there  without  his  share  until  he  was  convinced 
that  "demon  rum"  sometimes  has  its  uses.  The  fiery  stufif  may  not 
have  saved  our  lives,  but  it  came  very  near  it.  He  who  has  never 
tried  in  a  raging  downpour  to  light  a  fire  of  wood  soaked  through 
and  through  on  ground  an  inch  deep  with  water,  himself  running  like 
a  sieve  and  shaking  until  he  can  scarcely  hold  a  match,  has  no  notion  of 
the  high  value  of  profanity.  We  fought  tooth  and  nail  for  almost 
two  hours  before  we  finally  got  some  hot  tea,  and  more  or  less  roasted 
four  slabs  of  beef.  The  Indians  had  very  little  strength,  and  though 
it  took  most  of  my  time  to  bail  out  the  river-  and  rain-water,  the  rest 
of  it  I  paddled  hard  in  an  effort  to  restore  my  warmth. 

All  things  have  an  end,  however,  and  at  last  the  sun  came  out  and, 
broken  by  a  couple  of  showers  that  drenched  us  again,  stayed  with 
us  the  rest  of  the  day.  In  mid-afternoon  we  sighted  the  first  human 
beings,  a  group  of  Indians  with  file-pointed  teeth  and  wearing  more 
or  less  clothes,  who  stood  in  the  edge  of  the  jungle  beside  two  small 
deer  they  had  shot  with  ancient  muskets,  and  which  they  were  now 
skinning  and  preparing  to  roast  or  smoke  over  a  fire  on  the  ground. 
We  tried  to  buy  one  of  the  chunks  of  venison,  of  some  ten  pounds 
each,  that  lay  about  them,  but  we  had  no  money  except  gold  and 
paper.  Any  coin  w^ould  do;  in  fact,  the  chief  Indian  asked  "one 
coin" ;  but  he  was  a  wise  old  trader  of  some  experience  with  civiliza- 
tion, and  refused  even  my  pocket-mirror.  As  a  last  resort  we  offered 
him  two  boxes  of  matches,  a  very  high  price;  but  he  had  evidently 
once  been  in  Brazil  and  had  set  his  heart  on  a  milreis.  We  had  none, 
nor  any  coin  that  resembled  one,  so  we  tossed  the  meat  back  at  them 
and  went  on.  Though  we  wore  socks  against  the  insects,  shoes  would 
have  been  a  burden  in  the  ever  possible  necessity  of  swimming  for 
our  lives,  and  our  feet  were  constantly  in  water.  We  were  now  past 
the  Kanuku  Range,  and  one  side  of  the  river  broke  into  savannah. 


STRUGGLING  DOWN  TO  GEORGETOWN  527 

though  it  was  bushy  along  shore,  while  on  the  other  side  stretched  the 
unbroken  forest  wall.  Along  this  little  monkeys  dropped  from  high 
trees  to  the  branches  of  others  much  lower  with  a  crash  that  set  tiiem 
swiftly  to  vibrating.  Big  noisy  toucans  now  and  then  flew  past  in 
gorgeous  couples,  their  tails  streaming.  We  heard  the  howling  mon- 
keys again,  but  by  day  their  uproar  was  nothing  like  so  weird  and 
terrifying  as  it  had  sounded  high  up  in  the  flooded  tree-tops  of  the 
boundless  forest  the  night  before. 

The  best  time  anyone  had  ev^er  made  from  Melville's  to  the  Church 
of  England  Mission  at  Yupukari,  even  in  high  water,  was  four  days, 
it  was  a  most  agreeable  surprise,  therefore,  when  long  before  sunset 
on  this  second  day  Hart  suddenly  recognized  some  landmark  and 
swung  us  into  a  little  back-water  in  which  we  soon  tied  up  at  a  land- 
ing in  the  silent  woods.  Here,  taking  a  Sunday  afternoon  stroll  along 
a  trail  cut  through  the  jungle,  we  met  Parson  While  and  his  wife, 
the  first  Caucasian  woman  I  had  seen  since  leaving  Manaos,  followed 
by  their  baby  and  a  Hindu  nurse.  The  parson,  being  the  upholder 
of  civilization  in  wild  regions,  had  not  succumbed  to  bare  feet,  but 
wore  stout  shoes  and  golf  stockings,  vv^ith  "shorts,"  or  knickerbockers, 
above  them.  His  knees  were  bare  in  defiance  of  the  swarms  of  gnats, 
perhaps  as  a  sort  of  penance,  but  in  spite  of  this  and  our  unexpected 
appearance,  he  greeted  us  like  an  Englishman  and  a  parson.  He  was 
a  very  effective  man,  his  methods  being  quite  the  opposite  of  those  of 
his  Jesuit  fellow-missionary.  He  believed  in  keeping  a  curb-bit  on 
the  Indians,  never  allowing  them  to  come  into  his  house  and  ruling 
them  with  military  sternness.  When  I  told  him  that  I  needed  three 
Indians  to  go  on  with  me  as  soon  as  possible,  he  did  not  go  out  and 
ask  if  there  were  any  who  wished  to  go,  but  answered,  "Of  course ; 
you  shall  have  them  to-morrow  morning." 

We  swung  our  hammocks  under  a  new  thatched  roof  over  a  split- 
palm  floor  on  stilts.  The  Church  of  England  Mission  to  the  Macux\ 
Indians,  into  whose  territory  we  had  come  again,  was  built  on  high 
ground  some  little  distance  from  the  Rupununi,  though  mosquitoes 
and  gnats  were  still  so  troublesome  as  to  force  us  to  put  up  our  nets. 
Well  built  and  clean  Indian  huts  stood  at  a  respectful  distance  from 
the  parson's  bungalow,  where  there  was  an  air  of  business  efficiency. 
The  mission  had  many  cattle,  and  numbers  of  Indians  worked  for  it, 
though  they  were  also  given  a  certain  amount  of  instruction.  In  British 
Guiana  the  predominating  church  has  some  of  the  faults  of  unre- 
strained Catholicism  in  the  other  lands  of  South  America,  the  bishop, 


528  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

for  instance,  owning  personally  large  numbers  of  cattle;  hut  having 
no  confessional  or  oath  of  celibacy  to  spring  leaks  in  weak  vessels, 
the  result  is  mild  commercialism  rather  than  widespread  social  cor- 
ruption. The  parson  did  not  believe  in  teaching  the  Indians  English, 
but  in  learning  their  mother  tongue,  perfecting  it  as  much  as  possible, 
reducing  it  to  writing,  and  using  it  as  the  medium  of  instruction.  He 
had  found  its  grammar  excellent,  with  many  things  shorter  and  sharper 
than  in  English ;  but  it  was  impossible  to  teach  them  arithmetic  be- 
cause of  their  awkward  counting  system.  For  "six"  they  said  "a  hand 
and  one  over  on  the  other  hand,"  and  larger  numbers  were  whole 
sentences.  A  few  Indian  children  he  had  found  remarkably  bright'. 
He  said  that  the  tribe  scarcely  knew  what  it  is  to  steal,  but  that  those 
members  who  had  come  in  contact  with  negroes  in  the  "balata"  camps 
quickly  became  expert  thieves.  Their  greatest  fault  was  irresponsi- 
bility. Show  a  man  or  woman  how  to  do  a  thing  every  day  for  a 
month,  then  impress  it  upon  them  that  it  must  be  done  that  way  daily, 
and  at  the  end  of  three  days  it  would  be  found  that  they  had  ceased  to 
do  it,  had  succumbed  to  atavism  and  sunk  quickly  back  into  the  ways 
of  their  ancestors. 

Two  youths  in  the  Indian  prime  of  life  and  a  boy  of  sixteen  who 
looked  about  twelve,  but  who  spoke  English  and  was  to  act  as  my 
interpreter  as  well  as  steersman,  were  ready  at  dawn.  The  parson's 
orders  to  them  were  concise.  "You  will  take  this  gentleman  down 
to  the  "balata"  camps  as  rapidly  as  possible,  and  bring  the  boat  back 
here,"  he  commanded,  and  the  Indians  showed  no  tendency  to  argue 
the  matter.  Out  of  their  hearing  he  told  me  to  pay  them  for  six 
days, — two  down  and  four  back — and  that  five  shillings  each  for 
the  trip,  either  in  money  or  goods,  would  be  a  fair  wage.  Hart  was 
to  walk  back  home — much  nearer  from  here  than  from  Melville's — 
with  our  other  Indians,  carrying  various  things  that  had  come  up  the 
river  for  him.  Intrusted  with  the  parson's  big  tin  letter-box,  well 
padlocked,  for  the  bishop  in  Georgetown — so  seldom  does  anyone 
"go  down  to  town"  at  this  season — I  became  doubly  His  Majesty's 
Royal  Mail  Train. 

It  began  to  rain  the  instant  we  set  off,  but  this  time  I  could  crawl 
under  the  edge  of  the  tarpaulin,  though  huddled  and  cramped  as  I 
had  not  been  since  I  hoboed  under  the  hinged  platform  over  Pullman 
steps.  The  Indians,  of  course,  got  wet,  but  having  stripped  to  their 
red  breech-clouts  as  soon  as  they  were  out  of  sight  of  the  mission, 
this   seemed  to  trouble  them  Httle.     Notwithstanding  their  rounded 


STRUGGLING  DOWN  TO  GEORGETOWN  529 

stomachs,  full  to  capacity  of  that  miserable  hunger  antidote  made  of 
tlie  mandioca,  they  showed  some  energy.  It  is  a  fallacy,  however,  that 
wilderness  people  are  necessarily  robust  because  they  lead  simple  lives. 
They  are  patient  and  enduring,  but  exiKDsure  and  alternate  stuffing  and 
fasting  are  not  conducive  to  robust  health.  Sunshine  and  showers 
alternated  throu^^hout  the  day.  Here  and  there  were  patches  of 
savannah,  but  most  of  the  time  we  were  surrounded  by  endless  forest 
walls  and  utter  solitude.  When  I  felt  it  must  be  near  noon,  I  gave 
orders  to  land  at  the  next  opportunity  and  start  a  fire.  We  were  doing 
so  when  I  heard  curious  mutterings  and  stealthy  movements  among 
the  Indians  and  to  my  question  "Vincent"  replied  in  a  low  voice, 
"Black  men."  The  story  of  the  "Ocean  Shark"  still  fresh  in  memory,  I 
at  once  buckled  on  my  revolver  and  took  the  direction  indicated,  only 
to  find  a  group  of  negroes  of  the  West  Indian  type,  who  rose  to  their 
feet  as  I  approached  and  addressed  me  as  "sir."  They  were  part  of 
the  crew  of  Melville's  long  expected  boat,  which  had  left  Georgetown 
three  weeks  before,  and  they  were  waiting  for  the  black  policeman  in 
charge,  who  had  gone  up  an  estuary  with  twelve  paddlers  to  arrest  a 
native.  We  boiled  some  beef,  which  my  boys  ate  with  dry  farinha, 
refusing  beef-broth,  and  pushed  on. 

During  the  day  we  thoroughly  boxed  the  compass,  running  to  every 
point  of  it  with  the  winding  river.  It  was  broader  and  more  placid 
down  here,  though  still  swift  and  reaching  to  the  tops  of  many  good- 
sized  trees.  Hour  after  hour  the  steady,  rhythmic  thump  of  the  pad- 
dles against  the  boat  continued  with  the  glinting  lift  of  the  gleaming 
blades  as  the  two  boys  in  the  bow  shoveled  water  behind  them.  Their 
idea  of  good  paddling  appeared  to  be  to  throw  as  much  water  into 
the  air  with  each  stroke  as  possible,  and  this  sort  of  "grandstand  play" 
and  the  constant  monotonous  scrape  of  the  paddles  on  the  edge  of  the 
boat  seemed  much  wasted  effort.  Yet  we  bowled  along  much  faster 
than  the  swift  current.  I  paddled  considerably  myself,  but  though 
I  was  visibly  much  stronger  than  the  Indian  youths,  and  gave  much 
more  powerful  strokes,  I  could  not  hold  their  pace.  They  were  re- 
markably constant  in  keeping  it  up,  going  faster  and  faster  until  the 
bov.man  gave  a  signal  by  throwing  water  higher  than  usual,  where- 
upon they  started  anew  with  a  deeper  and  more  measured  stroke, 
which  in  a  few  minutes  became  fast  and  forceless  again.  They  did 
very  little  talking,  though  they  were  natural  and  unembarrassed  enough. 
"Soldiering."  such  as  letting  go  the  paddle  to  feel  of  a  toe  or  caress 
a  scratch,  never  brought  protest  from  the  others,  as  it  would  under 


530  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

like  circumstances  from  civilized  workmen.  Clothing  was  still  largely 
ornamental  and  a  fad  with  them,  and  their  wrecks  of  shirts  and  trou- 
sers were  more  often  discarded  than  worn,  except  in  the  case  of 
"Vincent,"  with  whom  they  seemed  to  be  a  sign  of  his  higher  social 
standing.  But  under  the  useless  garments  forced  upon  them  by  the 
missionaries  each  wore  a  bright-red  loincloth  always  kept  carefully  in 
place  by  a  stout  white  cord  about  the  waist.  Like  most  savages, 
though  they  were  indifferent  to  the  lack  of  other  clothes,  they  were 
far  more  careful  not  to  show  complete  nakedness  than  are  most 
civilized  men. 

I  had  planned  to  camp  at  dark,  but  to  my  surprise  the  Indians 
preferred  to  go  on,  saying  that  the  mosquitoes  and  gnats  were  too  thick 
to  make  sleep  possible.  Near  sunset,  therefore,  we  stopped  to  cook, 
and  were  off  again  at  dark.  The  deadly  stillness  of  night  at  times  was 
not  broken  even  by  the  faintest  sound  from  the  floating  boat,  but  only 
by  the  occasional  howling  of  some  animal,  evidently  a  "tiger,"  off 
somewhere  in  the  jungle.  It  was  too  cold  to  sleep ;  besides,  my  haclz 
ached  with  much  sitting  and  there  was  not  room  to  stretch  out.  Hour 
after  hour  the  boys  went  on,  sometimes  paddling,  sometimes  floating 
and  talking.  Then  the  clear  sky  grew  overcast,  distant  lightning 
flashed,  and  the  rain  began  again.  I  crawled  under  cover,  though  too 
cramped  to  sleep.  It  must  have  been  at  least  midnight  when  I  heard 
the  Indians  snatching  at  bushes  while  it  still  rained,  and  peered  out 
to  find  them  on  land  looking  for  a  place  to  sling  my  tarpaulin.  They 
got  it  up  after  a  fashion  in  the  dense  darkness  and  constant  drizzle, 
though  with  barely  room  vmder  it  for  my  hammock  and  net.  Then 
they  swung  their  own  hammocks  outside  and  dug  good  clothes  and 
blankets  from  their  bags;  but  though  they  had  ma*de  their  own  ham- 
mocks, insect  pests  did  not  seem  to  trouble  them  enough  to  induce 
them  to  make  themselves  nets. 

I  was  aroused  by  the  bashful,  girl-of-twelve  voice  of  "Vincent," 
whose  English  was  probably  similar  to  the  soft  language  the  Indians 
use  to  one  another  in  their  own  tongue,  in  which  there  never  seems 
to  be  a  harsh  word,  telling  me  that  it  would  soon  be  daylight.  We 
bailed  out  the  boat  and  reloaded  it,  all  in  wet  weeds,  sore  feet,  and 
constant  drizzle,  and  were  off  in  the  phantom  of  false  morning.  The 
soft,  velvety  tropical  dawn  came  quickly,  as  if  fleeing  before  the  mam- 
moth red  ball  that  pursued  it  up  over  the  horizon.  Pairs  and  trios  of 
parrots  flew  by  in  the  fresh  morning,  chattering  cheerily  to  one  another. 
Chirruping  black  birds  with  long  queenly  tails  were  the  most  con- 


STRUGGLING  DOWN  TO  GEORGETOWN  531 

spicuous  of  many  little  singing  birds ;  a  big  white  or  gray,  ponderously 
moving  bird,  like  a  heron,  was  the  largest  of  many  species.  Trees  and 
buslies  of  innumerable  kinds  were  interwoven  into  solid  walls  along' 
cither  bank,  "monkey  ropes"  galore  swinging  down  the  face  of  it, 
but  they  were  peopled  with  none  of  the  playful  creatures  of  our  school 
geographies.  I  gave  the  boys  a  big  dinner,  which  was  unwise,  for 
feast  or  famine  is  their  natural  way  of  life  and,  like  hunting  dogs, 
they  were  of  little  use  when  gorged.  The  river  was  lower  and  had 
turned  far  more  sluggish  for  lack  of  fall,  and  our  speed  depended 
mainly  on  paddling.  I  ached  from  head  to  foot  from  sitting  cramped 
for  four  days,  particularly  from  the  "jiggers"  that  had  burrowed  into 
my  bare  feet  on  the  tramp  to  Melville's,  a  tiny  insect  which  lays  its 
eggs  under  the  skin  and  especially  under  the  edges  of  the  nails,  where 
they  begin  to  swell  and  produce  acute  pain  until  they  are  cut  open  and 
squeezed  out.  No  one  had  any  notion  where  we  were  or  whether  we 
would  get  an) where  that  day ;  but  it  was  evident  that  we  could  not 
make  the  mouth  of  the  Rupununi,  and  at  dusk  we  pitched  camp  in  a 
site  cleared  by  other  travelers  in  the  edge  of  the  sloping  woods,  where 
the  mosquitoes  and  gnats  were  so  numerous  that  I  took  refuge  under 
my  net  while  supper  was  cooking. 

Monotonously  the  wide  river,  now  placid  and  mirror-like,  with  very 
little  current,  slipped  slowly  along  into  the  vista  of  endless  forest 
walls.  The  sun  poured  down  like  molten  iron.  In  mid-morning  we 
passed  the  only  boat  we  had  thus  far  met  on  the  trip,  carrying  an 
Indian  family,  the  woman  steering,  two  full-grown  girls  with  no  visible 
clothes,  and  several  men  paddling,  a  cur  dog  gazing  over  the  gunv/ale. 
They,  too,  tossed  water  high  in  the  air  with  every  stroke.  I  alter- 
nated between  paddling,  bailing  the  boat,  soaking  salt  meat  for  the 
meal  ahead,  reading,  writing,  and  sitting  stooped  forward  or  leaning 
back  to  ease  the  cramp  of  my  position.  At  least  one  did  not  need  to 
go  hungry  on  such  a  trip,  as  does  frequently  the  traveler  on  foot 
through  the  wild  places  of  the  earth.  Not  half  an  hour  below  where 
we  stopped  to  cook  dinner  beneath  a  majestic  tree  in  the  cathedral 
woods  we  passed  the  first  human  habitation  I  had  sighted  from  the 
river  since  leaving  Melville's,  though  I  had  expected  to  see  scores. 
It  was  an  Indian  hut,  or  rather  shelter,  for  it  had  no  walls ;  and  close 
beyond  were  two  or  three  more,  one  of  two  stories,  though  consisting 
merely  of  thatched  roofs  on  poles.  The  women  were  naked  as  the 
men,  except  for  bead  bracelets  and  anklets,  and  sometimes  an  old 
skirt,  though  more  often  they  had  only  a  beaded  apron  a  foot  or  more 


532  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

square  in  lieu  of  the  fig-leaf.  Little  girls  wore  the  same  ornaments, 
including  a  smaller  apron,  as  they  began  to  approach  puberty.  For- 
merly all  the  native  women  confined  themselves  to  this  costume,  but 
the  advent  of  missionaries  and  ranchers,  with  their  "civilizing"  influ- 
ence and  the  payment  of  everything  in  cloth,  has  begun  to  breed  an 
unnatural  prudery. 

It  was  perhaps  two  o'clock  in  the  afternoon  when  the  Chinese  wall 
of  forest  was  broken,  or  rather  spotted,  by  a  large,  rough  wooden 
building  with  a  sheet-iron  roof,  a  cluster  of  smaller  ones  about  it. 
This  was  "The  Stores,"  headquarters  of  three  rival  "balata"  com- 
panies, and  the  only  place,  except  Boa  Vista,  on  the  journey  from 
Manaos  where  goods  are  professionally  for  sale  or  buildings  are 
made  of  imported  material.  We  halted  at  the  third  and  last  among 
many  canoes  and  "perlite"  negroes,  just  before  the  Rupununi  flows 
into  the  Essequibo. 

The  manager  of  "Bugles  Store,"  to  whom  Melville  had  given  me  a 
letter,  w-as  a  burly,  bearded  man  nearing  forty,  born  in  the  colony 
of  Scotch  and  Irish  parents  and  speaking  with  a  peculiar  accent  gath- 
ered from  all  three  sources.  He  had  a  large  comfortable  house  and  a 
long  hut  for  the  stores  and  his  negro  henchmen,  all  surrounded  by  a 
pineapple  plantation.  I  had  my  belongings  brought  up  to  the  house 
at  once  and,  lest  my  Indians  should  disappear  before  I  knew  how  the 
land  lay,  the  paddles  also.  The  place  was  shut  in  at  a  crook  of  the 
river,  behind  a  forest  wall  that  utterly  smothered  the  breeze  for  which 
the  region  is  noted  and  made  it  hotter  than  I  had  ever  known  it  in 
British  Guiana.  We  sat  down  to  a  supper  of  rice,  canned  meat,  boiled 
pawpaw,  and  insects,  the  last  in  such  numbers  that  lights  were  taboo. 
Then  the  Scotch-Irish  Guianese  closed  every  window  with  a  fussy 
manner  and  some  remark  about  the  dangerous  night  air  and  we  began 
to  undress  in  the  darkness.  When  breathing  became  difficult,  I  noticed 
that  an  air-proof  tarpaulin  had  been  drawn  over  the  place  where  the 
ceiling  had  wisely  been  left  out  by  the  builders,  and  that  another  had 
been  spread  over  the  floor  to  shut  out  any  air  that  might  have  seeped 
through  its  narrow  cracks !  A  house  in  British  Guiana  should  consist 
of  roof  only,  as  the  Indians  know ;  this  one,  having  tight  walls,  still 
held  the  heat  of  the  day,  as  an  oven  retains  its  warmth  after  the  baking 
is  over.  Thus  does  atavism  cause  even  a  civilized  white  man  to  cling 
to  old  customs  when  they  should  be  thrown  away.  Outdoors,  in  the 
breeziest  spot,  would  have  been  none  too  comfortable  sleeping-quar- 
ters ;  yet  here  was  I  in  a  hermetically  sealed  room  and  down  in  the 


STRUGGLING  DOWN  TO  GEORGETOWN  533 

depths  of  a  thick  Ceara  hammock  with  a  tight  gnat-proof  net  over  me ! 
Within  ten  minutes  I  could  almost  swim  in  it,  the  perspiration  making 
my  many  insect  bites  and  skin  abrasions  itch  beyond  endurance. 
Though  he  had  hghted  a  lamp  as  soon  as  we  were  ready  for  bed,  the 
jjrudish  colonial  was  still  fussing  with  his  garments,  as  if  fearing  I 
might  catch  sight  of  his  ankles,  when  I  looked  out  again  to  suggest 
mildly  that  perhaps  it  would  be  less  inconvenient  for  him  if  I  moved 
my  hammock  out  into  the  hall.  He  agreed;  but  to  my  increasing 
astonishment  I  found  the  veranda,  too,  which  had  been  pleasantly  wide 
open  by  day,  likewise  hermetically  sealed  with  tarpaulin  curtains ! 
After  1  had  hung  my  hammock,  my  incomprehensible  host  spent  half 
an  hour  looking  for  another  lamp,  which  he  evidently  expected  me 
to  keep  blazing  all  night,  and  finally  retired  to  his  sealed  quarters, 
leaving  me  to  listen  to  the  ticking  and  striking  of  the  dozen  or  more 
trumpet-voiced  clocks  scattered  about  the  house.  He  plainly  had  a 
hobby  for  clocks,  perhaps  to  keep  time  from  running  away  from  him 
here  in  the  wilderness.  I  noiselessly  opened  a  couple  of  curtains  and 
blew  out  the  light,  and  actually  slept  a  bit  before  a  heathenish  hulla- 
baloo broke  out  long  before  daylight.  I  found  my  host  tramping 
moodily  back  and  forth  across  the  hollow  wooden  floor  in  his  heavy 
boots,  waking  everyone  and  everything  within  gunshot,  though  there 
was  no  earthly  necessity  for  anyone  being  up  for  hours  yet.  This, 
I  learned,  was  one  of  his  invariable  customs  and  innumerable  idiosyn- 
crasies. He  could  not  get  or  keep  Indian  employees,  not  only  because 
he  was  too  harsh  with  them,  but  because  he  insisted  on  everyone  going 
to  bed  about  seven  and  aroused  them  all  with  his  infernal  alarm-clocks 
at  four,  keeping  even  the  neighboring  camps  awake  from  then  on  by 
stamping  back  and  forth  on  the  resounding  floor.  Truly,  a  man  living 
alone  in  the  jungle  develops  his  own  individuality. 

Strictly  speaking,  "The  Stores"  were  not  public,  but  furnished  sup- 
plies to  the  "bleeders"  of  the  three  companies  in  the  "balata"  forests, 
who  gather  a  cheap  rubber  similar  to  the  caucho  of  Brazil.  "Balata" 
boats  had  been  in  the  habit  of  leaving  for  the  coast  every  few  days, 
and  no  one  had  so  much  as  suggested  the  possibility  of  my  having  any 
difficulty  in  getting  down  to  Georgetown,  once  I  had  reached  the  mouth 
of  the  Rupununi,  But  I  quickly  discovered  that  instead  of  the  worst 
being  over,  as  I  was  congratulating  myself,  the  crisis  of  the  trip  was 
still  ahead  of  me.  The  Essequibo  from  the  Rupununi  to  Potaro  mouth, 
whence  there  is  a  daily  launch,  is,  under  favorable  conditions,  only  a 
short  week's  trip ;  but  there  are  many  dangerous  falls,  to  be  passed 


534  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

only  in  certain  seasons,  obstacles  which  have  often  held  up  travelers 
for  months.  My  host  implied  that  such  was  to  be  my  fate.  Because 
of  the  drop  in  the  price  of  rubber,  not  a  "balata"  boat  had  gone  down 
the  river  in  weeks ;  and  though  a  messenger  was  dispatched  even  to  the 
rival  camps,  word  came  back  that  none  would  have  a  boat  leaving 
before  September  or  October!  It  was  then  the  middle  of  June.  My 
remark  that  I  would  much  prefer  going  over  the  falls  and  be  done 
with  it  seemed  lost  upon  my  egregious  host. 

Not  only  common  sense,  however,  but  the  law  forbade  my  attempt- 
ing the  trip  without  reasonable  preparations.  Entire  boatloads  of 
passengers  as  well  as  goods  had  more  than  once  been  completely  lost ; 
once  a  group  of  American  missionaries  who  had  insisted  on  going 
down  alone  had  been  drowned,  according  to  the  exiled  Scotch-Irishman, 
and  while  he  did  not  seem  to  feel  that  a  personal  loss,  it  required  him, 
in  his  capacity  as  the  only  British  official  in  the  region,  to  compel  me 
to  comply  with  the  law.  First  of  all,  I  must  have  a  certified  pilot  and 
bowman,  of  whom  there  were  not  a  dozen  on  the  river.  Moreover,  my 
host  was  a  justice  of  the  peace,  as  well  as  a  man  of  harsh  and  eccentric 
ways,  so  that  the  Indians  who  had  not  been  hired  on  long  contract 
and  forced  to  stick  to  it  gave  the  place  a  wide  berth,  particularly  as 
this  was  their  "off"  year,  when  they  wished  to  sta)'  at  home  to  burn 
off  and  plant  their  gardens,  or  because  they  properly  prefer  loafing  in 
the  vv'ilderness  to  working  for  a  song  for  cantankerous  white  men. 
To  comply  fully  with  legal  requirements,  I  should  evidently  have  to 
build,  buy,  or  hire  a  larger  new  boat  and  assemble  a  whole  expedition, 
at  a  cost  af  several  hundred  dollars.  My  only  other  hope  was  to  find 
a  certified  captain  who  would  be  willing  to  risk  his  life  with  me  in  the 
rotten  old  dugout  in  which  I  had  arrived ;  and  the  only  possible  can- 
didate for  that  romantic  position  lived  way  back  at  the  Indian  huts  we 
had  passed  the  day  before. 

We  set  out  for  them  at  seven  in  the  morning,  my  three  unwilling 
boys  augmented  by  a  half-sick  negro  named  Langrey,  who  wished  to 
get  down  to  Georgetown.  It  was  quite  a  different  task  from  traveling 
downstream.  All  five  of  us  paddled  the  whole  morning  without  a 
let-up,  yet  the  great  forest  wall  along  the  edge  of  which  we  struggled 
seemed  barely  to  move,  and  I  had  a  vivid  sample  of  the  hardships 
of  weeks  and  even  months  of  rowing  up-river  in  Amazonia,  where 
the  loss  of  a  single  stroke  to  catch  the  breath  leaves  that  much  of  the 
toilsome  task  to  be  done  over  again.  We  finally  landed  at  the  slight 
clearing  and  found  a  strong,  good-looking  young  Indian,  his  forehead 


STRUGGLING  DOWN  TO  GEORGETOWN  535 

and  cheeks  painted  some  tribal  color,  lying  in  loin-cloth  contentment 
in  his  hammock  under  a  roof  on  legs.    This  was  "Harris" — the  missions 
have  overdone  thems^elves   in  giving  the   Indians  clothing,   wedding- 
rings,  and  English  names  which  they  cannot  pronounce — or,  as  he 
called  himself,   "Hallish,"   certified  captain  of  the  interned  gasoline 
launch  of  one  of  the  stores,  but  who  was  "not  working  this  year." 
He  spoke  a  considerable  amount  of  a  kind  of  pidgin-English,  which 
added  to  his  enigmatical  air  and  somev.hat  almond  eyes  to  suggest 
remote   Chinese  ancestry.     Langrey  opened   fire  at  once,  and  there 
followed  a  long  argument,  or  almost  a  pleading  on  our  part,  with  little 
but  silence  from  the  other.     The  first  inclination  of  primitive  people 
is    wary   attention,    one   of    questioning   suspicion,    with    a    tendency 
toward  antipathy.     Finally  "Harris"  deigned  to  remark,  raising  him- 
self on  an  elbow  in  the  hammock  and  glancing  toward  it,  that  our 
canoe  was  too  old  and  small  for  such  a  trip.    Perhaps  we  could  borrow 
the  new  one  of  his  next-door  neighbor  a  few  miles  down  the  river, 
he  added   some   time   later,  lending  him  "mine"  until  his  own  was 
returned.     For  some  reason  "Harris"  w-ished  to  "go  down  to  town" 
himself,  or  no  argument  I  could  have  put  forward  would  have  shaken 
his  aboriginal  indifiference.     I  told  him  to  name  his  own  price..    He 
asked  ten  pounds !     Stranded  as  I  was,  I  balked  at  that,  but  Langrey 
butted  in,  and  it  turned  out  that  "Harris"  did  not  know  the  difference 
between  pounds  and  dollars,  so  that  ten  dollars  would  be  just  as  agree- 
able.    Then  he  must  wait  for  his  wife,  to  see  if  she  wished  to  go ! 
Yet  there  are  men  who  assert  that  Indian  women  are  downtrodden. 
She  appeared  by  and  by  from  the  woods,  where  she  had  been  digging 
mandioca-roots,  carrying  a  big  load  of  those  poisonous  tubers  on  her 
back  in  a  peculiar  open-work  basket  held  by  a  thong  across  her  fore- 
head and  wearing  nothing  but  a  scanty  skirt  from  waist  to  thighs. 
Though  she  had  already  been  seen  by  all,  so  that  any  modesty  she 
might  have  possessed  should  have  recovered,  she  went  to  a  nearby  roof 
on  poles  and  put  on  a  long  skirt  and  a  crumpled  waist,  though  the  latter 
scarcely  concealed  her  charms  and  the  former  she  unconsciously  pulled 
up  far  above  her  knees  when  she  sat  down  on  a  log  to  peel  the  man- 
dioca.     The  missionaries  who  had  given  her  and  her  husband  their 
wedding-rings  and  their  names  had  taught  them  what  to  wear  in  the 
]iresence  of  white  men,  but  she  knew  only  an  academic  reason  for 
doing  so. 

Our  errand  was  not  allowed  to  interfere  with  household  duties,  so 
while  "Harris"  lolled  in  his  hammock  and  the  rest  of  us  squatted  on 


536  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

stumps  and  stones  in  the  shade  of  his  roof,  the  woman  peeled  the 
mandioca-roots,  washed  them,  grated  them  on  a  native  implement, 
and  ran  the  mash  into  the  open  end  of  a  snake-like  matapi,  or  press 
made  of  woven  flat  fibers.  This  she  himg  by  the  upper  loop  from  a 
beam-end  and  attached  a  weight  to  the  lower  end,  thus  squeezing  out 
a  yellowish  juice  that  is  deadly  poison.  This  is  carefully  guarded 
from  children  and  dogs,  but,  being  volatile,  is  easily  eliminated  by 
boiling.  The  residue  is  then  dried,  sifted  through  basket  sieves,  and 
finally  baked  into  cassava  bread,  the  most  horrible  imitation  of  food 
extant,  great  pancake-like  sheets  of  which  were  even  then  spread  about 
the  thatch  roofs.  Though  similar  in  origin,  cassava  is  far  more  trying 
to  the  civilized  stomach  than  the  bran-like  farinha  of  Brazil. 

Negotiations  were  opened  again  in  due  season.     I  agreed  to  the 

princely  price  of  ten  dollars,  food  down  and  back  for  the  whole  party, 

even  including  the  wife,  and  promised  of  my  own  free  will  a  premium 

of  a  dollar  for  each  day  gained  over  the  usual  time  for  the  trip.     But 

here  we  struck  another  snag.     The  only  paddlers  available  were  the 

three  I  had  brought  with  me ;  and  they  absolutely  refused  to  go.    They 

insisted  that  the  Reverend  White  had  told  them  to  come  straight  back 

from  "The  Stores,"  and  that  he  was  a  man  to  be  obeyed.    I  knew  it; 

yet  I  was  not  going  to  be  held  a  prisoner  in  the  jungle  for  months  to 

suit  the  convenience  of  three  Indians,  even  with  a  parson  thrown  in. 

I  put  it  to  them  strongly.     If  they  would  go  down  to  Potaro  mouth 

with  me,  I  would  pay  them  good  wages  and  give  them  good  food  for 

both  the  down  and  the  up  trip  and  write  a  letter  of  explanation  for 

them  to  carry  back  to  the  missionary.     If  they  did  not  go,  they  could 

sit  here  twirling  their  thumbs  without  food,  for  I  would  not  let  them 

have  the  dugout  until  I  was  done  with  it.    They  had  a  gun  and  bows 

and  arrows  with  them,  and  no  doubt  other  Indians  would  not  let  them 

starve  and  might  even  lend  them  a  boat;  yet  I  felt  that  if  I  made  my 

blufif  strong  enough,  the  pressure  of  the  white  man's  will  would  win 

in  the  end,  barring  some  untoward  incident.     So  I  assured  "Harris" 

that  I  could  get  plenty  of  paddlers,  if  these  wished  to  starve,  assuming- 

great  indifference,  though  fearing  all  the  time  that  I  might  not  be  able 

to  coerce  them,  and  told  him  that  it  would  save  me  paying  what  I  owed 

them,  though  of  course  I  should  have  given  them  what  I  had  agreed 

upon  with  the  parson.    Leaving  that  bug  in  their  ears,  we  finally  ended 

our  long  and  leisurely  diplomatic  conference,   "Harris"  agreeing  to 

come  down  to  "The  Stores"  next  morning  with  his  neighbor's  new 

boat,  his  own  wife,  and  one  man,  while  I  was  to  furnish  four  paddlers, 


STRUGGLING  DOWN  TO  GEORGETOWN  537 

including  Langrey,  to  provide  all  supplies,  and  to  advance  him  five 
dollars  upon  his  arrival. 

All  the  way  back  I  let  the  paddlers  stew  in  their  own  thoughts,  pur- 
posely saying  nothing  and  reading  a  novel,  as  if  my  mind  were  at 
peace.  Like  all  children,  whether  of  the  wilderness  or  merely  in  age, 
coaxing,  I  felt  sure,  would  be  far  less  effective  with  them  than  moral 
pressure.  Time,  patience,  and,  above  all,  propinquity  would  eventually 
cause  their  primitive  wills  to  yield  to  mine.  As  we  passed  one  of  the 
huts  along  the  bank,  they  shouted  a  conversation  in  Macuxy  at  those 
about  it,  perhaps  getting  some  promise  that  a  boat  would  be  sent  for 
them.  Ignoring  this  and  their  former  vociferous  refusal,  however, 
I  called  "Vincent"  aside  when  we  landed  and  said,  in  the  tone  one 
might  use  to  a  pouting  child,  "You  talk  it  over  with  the  other  boys, 
and  when  you  have  made  up  your  minds,  come  and  tell  me  and  I  will 
get  you  food  to  cook."  As  they  had  not  eaten  at  all  that  day  and  were, 
if  my  own  appetite  was  any  gauge,  half-starved,  I  depended  on  hunger 
as  my  most  important  ally. 

The  Scotch-Irish  native,  who  addressed  his  negroes  as  "Mister,'' 
and  was  chary  of  running  foul  of  the  official  "Protector  of  the  Indians," 
as  well  as  having  the  Englishman's  fear,  several  times  multiplied,  of 
the  unprecedented,  could  not  for  a  long  time  be  talked  over.  Finally 
he  agreed  mildly  to  lend  his  aid,  and  sitting  down  on  his  doorstep, 
like  a  justice  holding  court,  he  called  the  three  boys  before  him  and 
addressed  them  in  laborious  pidgin-English.  "Xow  can't  leave  gentle- 
man here,  you  see.  Me  going  supply  provisions.  You  paddle  he 
down  .  .  ."  and  so  on;  after  all  of  which  they  mumbled  and  went  back 
to  the  bank  of  the  river.  But  my  most  powerful  ally  eventually  got 
in  its  work,  and  about  sunset,  having  meanwhile  visibly  wept,  they 
came  to  me  and  said  they  had  decided  to  go — whereupon  I  gave  them 
a  meal  that  left  "Vincent's"  little  paunch  protruding  like  a  chicken's 
crop.  Then  they  came  again,  in  a  far  more  cheerful  mood,  and  wanted 
a  pair  of  trousers,  a  shirt,  and  a  belt  respectively,  whether  to  gloat 
over  them  or  merely  to  see  the  color  of  my  coin  I  do  not  know.  These 
things  I  gave  them  on  account  from  the  storehouse,  and  they  w^ere  soon 
beaming  and  gay  as  happy  children. 

But  I  w-as  not  yet  done.  The  law  required  a  certified  bowman  and 
more  paddlers.  "Had  you  not  been  recommended  to  me  by  Melville, 
I  could  not  let  you  go  on  without  a  permit  from  the  Protector  of  the 
Indians," — who  never  stirs  out  of  Georgetown — added  my  charming 
host,  much  impressed  with  himself  as  an  officer  of  the  law,  like  all 


538  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

wooden-headed  authorities.  We  debated  another  hour  or  more  before 
he  agreed,  with  the  air  of  doing  my  whole  nation  an  extraordinary 
favor,  to  consider  me  one  of  the  paddlers  and  my  best  boy  an  experi- 
enced bowman.  Then,  out  of  the  kindness  of  his  heart,  he  permitted 
me  to  buy  from  his  store — at  prices  I  found  later  to  be  between  five 
and  six  times  those  of  Georgetown — the  rations  required  by  law, — 
seven  days'  supplies  for  seven  people,  or  forty-nine  rations,  each  of 
which  must  include  a  pound  of  flour,  half  a  pound  of  rice,  two  ounces 
of  pork,  ditto  of  beef,  twice  that  of  fish,  two  ounces  of  sugar,  and  so 
on  through  about  twenty  items,  not  to  mention  milk  and  cocoa  and 
many  other  extras  for  "the  captain,  Harris"  and  myself.  The  fact 
that  the  manager  himself  gets  twenty  per  cent,  on  all  sales  from  the 
store  may  or  may  not  have  made  him  so  insistent  on  full  compliance 
with  the  law.  When  the  list  was  completed  he  handed  me  a  bill  for 
$22.71,  and  then  growled  because  I  paid  him  with  a  five-pound  note, 
instead  of  in  gold. 

When  I  fancied  everything  settled  at  last,  Langrey  came  to  me  with 
tears  struggling  over  his  eyelids  and  said,  "So  sorry,  sir,  I  was  so 
interested  in  this  trip.    But  I  can't  go." 

"Why  not?"  I  asked. 

"Because,  sir,  I  have  not  the  passage  money  from  Potaro  mouth 
down  to  Georgetown." 

"How  much  will  that  be  ?" 

"$2.08,  second-class,  sir." 

"But  surely,  after  working  nearly  four  months  for  this  company 
you  have  earned  that  much  ?" 

"No,  sir.    I  took  an  advance,  and  the  food  costs  so  much." 

"Well,  as  you  were  injured  working  for  them,  surely  they  will  help 
you  to  that  extent  to  get  back  home  ?" 

"No,  sir,  them  don't  help  we  none,"  replied  Langrey,  slipping  back 
into  his  more  habitual  speech. 

This  statement  having  been  confirmed  by  my  host,  I  gave  him  a 
hint  of  what  I  thought  of  the  company  he  represented  and  promised 
the  invalid  negro  his  fare  to  Georgetown.  By  this  time  the  visible  cost 
of  the  perhaps  four  days'  trip  to  Potaro  mouth  exceeded  fifty  dollars. 

These  "balata"  companies  exploit  not  only  the  natural  resources,  but 
the  natives,  with  a  system  almost  as  near  slavery  as  that  in  the  rubber- 
fields  of  Amazonia,  against  which  England  had  recently  made  a  loud 
uproar,  Langrey 's  case  was  typical  of  many.  He  had  worked  seven 
years  for  this  company.     Each  spring  he  applied  at  headquarters  in 


STRUGGLING  DOWN  TO  GEORGETOWN  539 

Georgetown  and  got  $10  advance  and  a  $10  order  on  the  company 
store.  Leaving  the  latter  with  his  family  (and  no  doubt  gambling 
away  the  former),  he  joined  many  other  negroes  who  had  signefl 
similar  contracts  and  helped  row  a  company  freight-boat  up  the  river. 
On  this  wages  were  48  cents  a  day  and  an  allow^ance  of  $2.08  a  week 
for  food ;  but  as  they  must  buy  all  provisions  at  the  company  stores, 
at  breath-taking  prices,  because  they  are  forbidden  to  bring  anything 
with  them  from  Georgetown  and  there  is  nothing  for  sale  elsewhere 
up  the  river,  it  is  easy  to  see  that  the  "bleeders"  cannot  but  make  a 
decided  inroad  on  their  future  wages  before  they  set  oflF  into  the  woods 
to  hunt  the  "bullet-tree."  This  is  a  very  large  member  of  the  sapote 
family,  the  bark  of  which  the  "bleeder"  gashes  in  zigzag  form  from 
the  ground  to  a  height  of  perhaps  thirty-five  feet,  using  a  ladder  and 
a  rope — spurs  are  illegal — and  cutting  with  a  machete.  It  requires 
long  practice  to  cut  deep  enough,  yet  not  too  deep ;  wherefore  the 
average  "bleeder"  makes  little  or  nothing  during  the  first  year  or  two. 
Incisions  in  the  bark  must  run  into  and  not  cross  one  another,  and 
must  not  be  more  than  one  and  a  half  inches  long.  No  "bullet-tree" 
can  be  cut  down,  except  when  necessary  in  making  a  trail ;  the  law 
forbids  a  tree  being  bled  in  more  than  half  its  circumference  at  a 
time,  the  tapping  of  any  tree  of  less  than  thirty-six  inches  diameter, 
the  "bleeding"  of  the  branches,  or  cutting  clear  through  the  bark. 
Once  it  has  been  tapped,  the  tree  must  stand  five  years  before  the 
other  side  can  be  bled.  Companies  with  "balata"  concessions  are  al- 
lowed to  take  nothing  else  from  the  crown  lands  that  are  leased  to  them 
for  that  purpose,  and  if  the  workmen  were  half  as  well  protected  as  the 
trees,  the  "balata"-fields  would  border  on  L^topia. 

Every  "bleeder"  must  be  registered  -with  the  department  of  forests 
and  mines,  and  pay  a  government  license  fee  of  one  shilling.  The 
negroes  build  rude  huts  in  the  forest,  but  are  not  allowed  to  bring  their 
women  with  them.  Each  tree  yields  about  a  gallon  of  "milk,"  which 
the  sap  resembles  both  in  looks  and  taste,  and  which  is  gathered  every 
afternoon  and  poured  into  an  immense  wooden  tray  protected  from 
the  direct  rays  of  the  sun.  Mere  it  coagulates,  forming  a  kind  ot 
cream  on  top.  This  hardens  into  an  immense  sheet  of  celluloid  color 
that  is  peeled  off  and  folded  like  an  ox-hide  for  shipment.  Day  after 
day  "milk"  is  added  and  the  "cream"  peeled  off,  each  gallo!--  of  "milk" 
giving  about  five  pounds  of  "balata."  In  December  the  "bleeder"  car- 
ries his  traps  back  to  the  river  and  down  to  camp,  usually  averaging  a  bit 
under  a  thousand  pounds  of  "balata"  for  the  season,  for  which  he  was 


540  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

then  getting  $170.  Advances,  food,  and  high  priced  provisions  sub- 
tracted, he  is  lucky  if  he  has  anything  left  to  gamble  away  when  he  gets 
back  to  town.  If  a  man  is  sick  or  cannot  work  for  any  other  reason, 
such  as  heavy  rain,  he  gets  no  wages,  but  he  must  pay  40  cents  a  day 
for  his  rations,  as  well  as  for  his  medicines.  Of  course  the  company 
has  to  guard  against  malingering  by  lazy  negroes ;  yet  if  Langrey  was 
a  fair  example,  they  are  moderately  earnest,  responsible  workers.  He 
had  not  lost  a  day  in  his  seven  years,  he  asserted,  until  he  had  injured 
his  back  falling  from  a  tree  a  short  time  before ;  yet  the  company  would 
give  him  no  assistance  to  return  to  town.  If  a  negro  runs  away  from 
his  contract,  he  gets  from  four  months  to  a  year  in  prison  and  is  made 
to  pay  back  his  advance ;  if  he  lives  out  his  contract,  he  goes  down  the 
river  again  by  rowing  a  company  boat  at  two  shillings  a  day.  But  down 
on  the  coast  a  negro  gets  only  32  cents  a  day — the  minimum  wage  in 
British  Guiana — or  perhaps  two  shillings  for  loading  ships,  at  which 
''he  not  easy  to  find  job,"  so  that  the  more  enterprising  of  the  race  come 
up-river  annually  to  "bleed"  the  "bullet-tree." 

In  the  morning  "Harris"  turned  up,  accompanied  by  his  wife,  a  par- 
rot, many  sheets  of  newly  baked  cassava  bread,  and  his  "canister,"  a 
small  tin  box  for  personal  possessions  such  as  most  workmen  in  this 
region  carry.  He  bore  no  tribal  marks  now,  and  his  wife  was  fully 
dressed  from  neck  to  ankles.  But  he  came  in  a  miserable  little  old 
dugout  of  his  own,  saying  he  could  neither  get  the  extra  man  nor  bor- 
row his  neighbor's  ne\y  boat.  My  plans  seemed  again  about  to  topple 
over.  But,  to  my  astonishment,  "Harris"  agreed  to  try  to  make  the 
trip  in  Melville's  decrepit  craft,  evidently  being  very  anxious  to  get 
down  to  town.  This  might  have  served  as  a  last  resort,  in  spite  of  the 
much  greater  fury  of  the  Essequibo  than  the  Rupununi,  had  we  been 
allowed  to  go  on  short  rations,  or  even  with  the  amount  we  would 
probably  need.  Legally,  the  wife  would  serve  as  the  extra  paddler,  but 
we  were  compelled  by  lav/  to  load  the  poor  old  derelict  to  the  gunwales 
— nay,  far  above  them.  I  protested  that  such  a  load  would  almost  cer- 
tainly swamp  the  boat.  My  delightful  host  said  that  did  not  matter  in 
the  least ;  the  law  required  that  those  who  hired  Indians  must  have  one 
pound  of  flour,  and  so  on,  each  day  to  feed  them,  but  it  did  not  specify 
that  they  should  not  be  drowned  before  the  end  of  the  trip.  So  I  was 
compelled  to  pile  the  fifty-pound  sealed  can  of  flour  on  top  of  all  the 
rest  of  our  load,  though  even  the  exiled  Scotch-Irishman  admitted,  ir 
his  non-official  capacity,  that  Indians  do  not  eat  flour,  except  undei 
compulsion,  and  that  we  had  more  than  they  could  eat  without  it ;  and 


STRUGGLING  DOWN  TO  GEORGETOWN  541 

thereby  our  already  excellent  chances  of  bringing  up  at  the  bottom  of 
the  Essequibo  were  considerably  increased. 

My  host  maintained  his  reinitation  to  the  very  moment  of  our  de- 
parture. The  company  having  abandoned  Langrey  half -sick  from  in- 
juries sustained  in  their  employ,  and  I  having  agreed  to  lake  him  all  the 
way  home,  one  would  have  supposed  that  a  slight  parting  kindness 
would  not  have  bankrupted  the  corporation.  As  we  were  on  the  point 
of  leaving,  I  said,  "By  the  way,  that  man  of  yours  we  are  taking  down 
with  us  has  no  paddle,  unless  you  can  lend  him  one." 

"He's  no  mon  of  ours!"  hastily  and  half-angrily  answered  the  pro- 
vincial Scotch-Irishman.  "If  I  lind  a  paddle,  it  will  be  to  you  per- 
sonally, and  I  will  hold  you  responsible  for  getting  it  back  to  me  1" 

Thereupon  he  got  a  miserable  old  cracked  and  mended  paddle  about 
the  size  of  a  lath  and  tossed  it  out  to  us.  I  promised  to  send  it  back 
by  special  messenger. 

So  at  last,  on  June  18,  we  were  off  at  eleven  in  the  morning.  IMy 
three  now  tanned  and  tamed  paddlers  were  in  front,  the  rather  useless 
I^ngrey  and  "Harris'  "  paddleless  wife  and  her  parrot  on  the  seat 
back  of  the  tarpaulin-covered  baggage  and  supplies,  while  I  was 
cramped  in  between  them  and  the  certified  "captain-and-pilot"  squat- 
ting on  the  stern.  It  seemed  foolish  to  take  pictures  or  keep  notes 
of  the  trip,  so  slight  were  the  chances  of  ever  getting  them  back  to 
civilization.  I  took  the  laces  out  of  my  heavy  shoes,  however,  so 
that  I  could  kick  them  off  and  at  least  have  a  fighting  chance  to  save 
my  own  hide. 

In  a  few  minutes  we  slid  out  of  the  Rupununi  into  the  Essequibo, 
wide  as  the  lower  Hudson  and  six  hundred  miles  long,  the  principal 
river  of  British  Guiana,  and  struck  across  a  veritable  lake  at  the 
junction,  with  the  waves  running  so  high  that  we  shipped  much  water 
to  add  to  that  constantly  seeping  into  the  old  and  now  badly  strained 
dugout.  For  a  time  it  looked  as  if  we  might  sink  immediately,  instead 
of  doing  so  after  several  days  of  arduous  toil.  I  bailed  incessantly, 
and  at  last  we  came  under  the  lee  of  the  wooded  shore  and  plodded 
along  more  or  less  safely,  shut  in  by  the  long  familiar  wall  of  unbroken 
forest-jungle. 

W'e  had  no  champion  paddlers  on  board.  The  three  boys  messed 
along  steadily  but  not  very  earnestly ;  Langrey,  the  invalid,  slapped 
his  lath-like  paddle  in  and  out  of  the  water  with  just  exertion  enough 
to  pass  as  a  boatman  rather  than  a  passenger ;  and  though  I  got  in  some 
long  and  more  powerful  strokes,   I   never  succeeded   in  keeping  the 


542  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

bowman's  pace  for  any  length  of  time  and  shoveled  water  mainly  to 
relieve  the  monotonous  drudgery  of  bailing  the  boat.  This  eminently 
feminine  job  was  the  only  work  expected  of  the  captain's  wife,  but 
most  of  it  fell  to  my  lot  because  the  water  gathered  deepest  about  my 
feet.  The  lady  wore  a  skirt  and  some  sort  of  bodice  or  waist,  but 
these  were  thin  and  mainly  ornamental,  and  rather  than  wet  her  skirt 
she  would  pull  it  above  her  knees,  disclosing  plump  brownish  legs 
decorated  with  a  cross-bar  and  three  painted  stripes  running  from 
ankle  to — well,  as  high  as  the  skirt  ever  went  in  our  presence.  Her 
face,  also,  was  symbolically  painted,  and  she  wore  a  towel  about  her 
plentiful  horse-mane  hair.  Her  role  was  strictly  passive.  She  made 
no  advances,  never  speaking  to  anyone  but  her  husband,  and  then 
in  barely  audible  undertones,  not  merely  because  she  knew  no  English, 
for  she  was  quite  as  taciturn  toward  the  paddlers  of  her  own  race 
as  with  Langrey  or  me.  Yet  her  husband  granted  her  their  better 
umbrella  when  roaring  showers  fell,  and  in  general,  considering  their 
scale  of  life,  treated  her  as  well  as  does  the  average  civilized  husband 
of  the  laboring  class.  To  be  sure,  he  had  lain  in  a  hammock  while 
she  dug  mandioca  and  made  cassava  bread,  but  somewhere  I  have 
seen  a  civilized  man  lie  in  a  Morris  chair  while  his  wife  washed  dishes 
and  baked  pies.  They  seemed  to  have  as  much  mutual  understanding 
and  to  "communicate  by  a  sigh  or  a  gesture"  as  easily  as  more  fully 
clothed  couples. 

We  were  gradually  turning  to  English;  four  out  of  seven  of  us 
now  spoke  it.  In  the  pidgin-English  of  the  Indians,  which  passed 
between  "Harris"  and  the  now  deposed  and  disrobed  "Vincent,"  com- 
paratives and  superlatives  were  always  formed  with  "more"  and 
"most,"  and  the  positive  rather  than  the  negative  adjective  served  both 
purposes.  The  river  was  "more  deep,"  "not  deep,"  "not  more  deep," 
but  never  shallow ;  it  was  "most  wide,"  "not  wide,"  or  "not  most  wide," 
but  never  narrow — though  both  knew  the  meaning  of  the  other  words 
readily  enough.  Nothing  could  induce  the  Indians  to  express  an 
opinion  of  their  own,  or  rather,  they  never  showed  any  sign  of  personal 
volition  to  a  white  man  if  they  could  possibly  avoid  it.  Ask  them, 
"Is  it  better  to  stop  at  the  clearing,  or  to  camp  across  the  river?"  and 
the  reply  would  be,  "Yes,  sir;  all  right,  sir,"  or  something  similar.  One 
might  strive  for  an  hour  to  find  out  what  they  would  do  if  they  were 
alone,  and  even  then  succeed  only  by  carefully  refraining  from  sug- 
gesting any  preference.    Like  the  Indians  of  the  Andes,  they  preferred 


STRUGGLING  DOWN  TO  GEORGETOWN  543 

to  wait  for  a  leading  question,  so  that  they  could  answer  what  they 
thought  the  questioner  would  he  most  pleased  to  hear. 

Langrey  had  his  own  opinions,  hut  it  was  long  since  he  had  heard  any 
news  from  the  (.utsitle  world.  He  did  not  know  that  there  was  a 
war  in  Europe,  though  he  did  leave  off  paddling  suddenly  one  day 
to  say,  "Ah  sure  sorry  to  heard,  sir,  dat  Jack  Johnson  los'  de  champeen- 
ship.  When  he  winned,  all  we  hlack  man  in  Georgetown  parade,  sir." 
He  was  convinced  that  the  "hlack  man" — under  no  circumstances  did 
he  use  the  word  "negro" — was  superior  to  the  white,  mentally  as  well 
as  physically,  and  spei:t  many  a  sun-hlistering  hour  citing  examples  to 
prove  it.  One  such  assertion  was  that  the  white  authorities  had  to 
change  and  give  more  examinations  in  the  schools  and  colleges  of  the 
colony,  because  the  blacks  were  winning  everything.  Yet  he  was  always 
obsec|uious  to  white  men,  addressed  me  unfailingly  as  "sir,"  and  was 
much  pained  to  see  me  do  the  slightest  manual  labor.  Yet  it  may  be 
that  he  would  have  treated  in  the  same  manner  one  of  his  own  race 
having  what  to  him  were  money  and  position,  as  I  saw  him  later  act 
toward  wealthy  Chinese. 

A  bit  after  mid-afternoon  we  came  to  several  arms  of  the  river 
where  it  split  between  densely  wooded  banks,  with  immense  reddish- 
brow-n  rocks  protruding  here  and  there  from  the  water  and  the  sound 
of  rapids  beginning  to  worry  us.  But  the  river  at  this  point  was  so 
high,  broad,  and  swift  that  we  had  no  difficulty  in  running  what 
Langrey  called  a  "scataract."  though  in  other  seasons  it  had  often 
proved  a  time-consuming  obstacle.  The  sun  had  sunk  behind  one  of 
the  walls  of  trees  when  we  swung  in  to  clutch  the  swiftly  passing 
bank  just  above  another  rapids,  where  the  men  soon  cut  saplings  and 
pitched  camp.  First  they  set  up  a  frame  and  stretched  my  tarpaulin 
tent-wise  over  it,  putting  my  netted  hammock  and  baggage  under  it 
and  forming  what  Langrey  called  the  "chief's  place."  He  was  so  much 
higher  in  the  Guianese  social  scale  that,  though  "Harris"  was  supreme 
in  the  matter  of  steering  and  boatmanship,  the  negro  assumed  the 
place  of  first  lieutenant  under  me  the  instant  we  set  foot  on  shore. 
He  swung  his  own  hammock  at  a  respectful  distance  from  my  own 
luxurious  quarters,  yet  far  enough  from  the  Indians  to  emphasize  the 
difference  in  ranlc ;  while  the  Indians  themselves  split  carefully  into 
two  parties,  even  building  separate  fires,  "Harris"  and  his  wife  close 
together  under  the  same  net  and  the  three  boys  in  a  group  a  little 
removed  from  all  the  others.  Thus  the  caste  system  was  religiously 
and  Britishly  preserved  even  in  the  wilderness  a  thousand  mile?  f'-om 


544  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

nowhere.  Langrey  pestered  me  to  death  with  his  servitude.  If  I 
tried  to  cook  anything  myself,  he  dropped  whatever  he  was  doing  and 
ran  to  insist  on  doing  it  for  me.  When  it  was  cooked  and  I  told  him 
to  have  some  himself,  he  stood  stiffly  at  attention  and  refused — hy 
actions,  rather  than  by  words — to  touch  a  mouthful  or  even  to  assume 
the  position  of  "at  ease"  until  I  had  finished.  If  I  dared  to  wash  my 
plate  or  cup,  he  bounded  forward  with  the  air  of  an  English  butler, 
exclaiming,  "Now,  now,  sir;  you  must  ahvays  call  tnc  when  you  want 
anything  done."  Sometimes  I  could  have  kicked  him;  but  I  always 
recalled  in  time  that  it  was  not  his  fault,  that  this  was  part  of  that 
British  civilization  I  had  come  overland  from  Alanaos  to  study,  and 
that,  being  a  mere  visitor  in  this  foreign  realm,  I  must  not,  even  inad- 
vertently, Americanize  British  subjects.  Theirs  was  a  manner  quite 
different  from  the  Brazilian  or  the  Iberian,  even  of  men  of  Langrey's 
color,  with  which  I  had  grown  so  familiar  that  the  Anglo-Saxon  style 
struck  me  as  stranger  and  more  foreign.  The  same  race  which  inces- 
santly shook  hands  and  kowtowed  to  one  another  on  every  provocation 
over  in  Brazil,  here  had  adopted  that  staid,  caste-bound  demeanor  of  the 
Briton,  keeping  up  the  acknowledged  rules  of  society  in  the  wilderness 
just  as  the  lone  Englishman  will  put  on  evening  clothes  to  dine  with 
himself  in  a  log  cabin.  Yet  for  all  the  superficial  super-politeness  of  the 
Brazilian  mulatto  or  cabra  and  the  Englishness  of  these  Guianese 
negroes,  they  were  the  same  man  underneath ;  in  both  cases  their  man- 
ners were  only  borrowed  garments  put  on  to  make  them  look  like  other 
people  and  help  them  get  along  in  the  world  with  the  least  possible 
friction. 

Indians  working  for  white  men  must  eat  expensive  supplies  from 
town,  though  they  much  prefer  their  native  food ;  but  negroes  can  be 
fed  anything,  though  here  they  have  been  accustomed  for  generations 
'to  the  fare  of  civilization.  Complete  as  were  our  legal  rations,  the 
Indians  did  not  like  them,  so  that  they  fell  chiefly  to  Langrey  and  me. 
The  fifty-pound  can  of  flour  for  which  I  had  paid  $8.75  proved  to  be 
so  moldy  that  no  one  would  touch  it ;  the  sugar  was  the  coarsest  grade 
of  brown,  and  the  rest  was  poor  in  proportion.  The  ration  law,  like 
many  another  isolated  British  ordinance,  had  plainly  been  made  by  a 
man  who  had  never  set  foot  in  the  wilds.  Our  farinha  had  run  out, 
more  's  the  pity,  for  though  it  tasted  like  sawdust,  it  was  swelling  and 
filling;  and  now  in  its  place  we  had  far  less  palatable  cassava  bread 
made  of  the  same  poisonous  tuber.  We  all  ate  cassava,  and  the  flour 
might  to  great  advantage  have  been  thrown  overboard,  but  law  is  law. 


STRUGGLING  DOWN  TO  GEORGETOWN  545 

Swift  places  in  the  river  were  numerous  the  next  clay,  and  finally, 
at  a  "scataract"  among  countless  massive  brown-red  boulders,  we  had  to 
get  out  and  let  the  boat  down  by  ropes.  Dense  jungle  crowded  close 
to  the  shore  wherever  there  were  no  boulders  and  often  made  it 
impossible  to  do  likewise  in  worse  spots,  where  we  had  to  run  the  risk 
of  shooting  the  rapids,  shipping  water  perilously.  Twice  a  day  we 
stopped  to  cook,  the  second  time  to  camp  as  well.  Sometimes,  during 
the  noonday  halt,  I  strolled  a  little  way  into  the  majestic  forest,  the 
leafy  roof  upheld  by  mighty  trees  averaging  a  hundred  feet  in  height, 
with  buttressed  roots,  as  if  they  had  been  designed  as  pillars  to  support 
the  sky,  and  with  room  for  a  whole  Brazilian  family  to  sit  down  in  the 
space  between  any  two  buttresses.  Other  trees  were  incredibly  slender 
for  their  height,  some  barely  six  inches  through,  yet  climbing  straight 
up  to  the  sunlight  far  above.  On  the  river  long-tailed  parrots  flew 
by  in  couples  at  frequent  intervals,  screaming  like  a  quarreling  Irish 
pair ;  but  here  in  the  woods  not  a  bird  sang,  rarely,  indeed,  was  one 
seen.  From  the  hour  when  the  night  voices  of  the  jungle-forest  ceased 
in  the  great  silence  of  dawn,  as  if  nature  stood  mute  at  her  own 
magnificence,  there  was  a  cathedral  stillness  in  these  woods.  Yet  at 
times  the  ears  were  filled  with  an  indefinable,  almost  intangible  sound,  a 
curious  humming,  mysterious  as  the  sensual  smell  of  the  forest.  Para- 
sites seemed  trying  to  suffocate  the  trees  with  their  passionate  embrace, 
yet  I  got  little  sensation  of  that  "death  everywhere  exuding"  reported 
by  so  many  Amazonian  travelers ;  rather  did  one  feel  an  agreeable 
impression  of  isolation  and  of  well-being  under  that  impenetrable 
roof  of  vegetation,  in  a  world  such  as  Adam  might  have  seen  on 
the  first  day  of  his  life. 

Insects  were  less  troublesome  along  the  Essequibo,  and  for  some 
reason  we  suffered  little  from  heat,  though  the  sun  struck  straight 
down  upon  the  broad  river,  which  threw  it  back  in  our  faces  in  scintilla- 
tions of  polished  copper  that  blinded,  visibly  tanning  us  all — except 
Langrey.  A  cool  breeze  was  rarely  lacking,  and  every  little  while  there 
came  the  growing  noise  of  rain,  castigating  the  woods  ever  more 
furiously  as  it  drew  near,  the  wind  swaying  the  great  tree-tops  and 
now  and  then  turning  aside  from  their  course  a  pair  of  voyaging  parrots. 
Occasionally  we  passed  the  skeleton  of  a  camping-place,  a  tangle  of 
poles  over  which  tarpaulins  had  been  hung  by  other  and  larger 
parties.  The  howling  of  monkeys,  like  the  roar  of  a  far-off  riot,  like 
some  great  but  distant  crowd  furious  with  anger,  often  sounded  from 
back  in  the  forest.    The  river  frequently  broke  up  into  many  diverging 


546  WORKING  NORTH  FROiAI  PATAGONIA 

branches,  almost  as  large  in  appearance  as  the  main  stream,  which  dis- 
appeared ofl  through  the  wilderness.  In  the  dry  season  the  Essequibo 
is  a  meandering  stream  that  one  can  almost  wade,  its  broad  bed  filled 
with  dry  sand  and  stretches  of  huge  rocks  which  now  were  racing 
rapids,  showing  themselves  chiefly  as  immense  whirlpools  on  the  surface 
of   the  deep  river. 

We  ran  some  very  heavy  rapids,  the  waves  often  tossing  over  our 
low  gunwales;  but  "Harris"  was  skilful,  and  the  mere  fact  that  he  had 
his  wife  along  seemed  pretty  good  proof  that  he  hoped  to  escape 
shipwreck — or  was  it?  Then  one  afternoon  a  mighty  booming  began 
ahead  and  soon  filled  all  the  forest  with  its  echoes.  I  pulled  out  my 
map,  but  Langrey  disputed  its  assertions  with  an  excited,  "On  de 
chaht  dat's  a  scataract,  sir;  but  dat  ain'  no  scataract ;  dat's  a  falls!"  The 
emphasis  on  the  last  word  was  not  misplaced,  even  though  what  is  a 
sheer  fall  of  several  feet  in  the  dry  season  was  now  a  long  series  of 
rapids  which  we  ran,  constantly  expecting  to  be  swamped  the  next 
moment,  and  finally  coming  to  a  real  drop  over  immense  boulders.  We 
eased  her  down  for  a  long  way  hand-over-hand,  clutching  bushes  along 
the  shore,  struggling  to  maintain  a  waist-deep  footing  on  slippery  rock, 
needing  the  combined  exertions  of  all  of  us,  except  the  woman,  to 
keep  even  the  lightened  boat  from  submerging  and  leaving  us  stranded  in 
the  wilderness.  But  though  they  did  not  look  as  dangerous,  the  next 
series  of  rapids  was  far  more  so,  for  there  was  nothing  to  do  but  run 
them,  and  suddenly  in  the  very  middle  of  them  two  waves  all  but  filled 
the  boat,  and  I  prepared  to  say  good-by  to  my  earthly  possessions  and 
take  up  my  abode  under  a  tree  in  the  impenetrable  forest — though  at 
the  same  time  I  bailed  as  savagely  as  the  men  paddled,  so  that  we 
saved  ourselves  by  a  hair.  For  more  than  an  hour  there  was  a  constant 
succession  of  these  near-disasters.  The  river  split  up  into  many  chan- 
nels, and  the  one  we  entered  might  look  smooth  and  harmless,  only  to 
prove  a  young  Niagara  when  it  was  too  late  to  turn  back.  Dry  clothing 
was  unknown  among  us  during  those  days.  It  was,  of  course,  mainly 
fear  for  my  baggage  that  sent  the  twinges  up  my  spine ;  for  I  could 
probably  have  saved  myself.  But  to  be  left  boatless,  foodless,  and 
kodakless  here  in  the  heart  of  the  trackless  wilderness,  with  the  chances 
remote  of  meeting  another  human  being  during  a  lifetime,  would  have 
been  more  heroic  than  interesting.  When  we  came  at  last  into  more 
placid  water,  Langrey  cheered  me  with  the  information  that  there  were 
"more  worse  scataracts"  and  falls  a  couple  of  days  farther  on.  The 
rocky  streak  where  the  high  lands  of  the  savannahs  get  down  to  sea- 


STRUGGLING  DOWN  TO  GEORGETOWN  54? 

ievd  runs  clear  across  the  colony  here  near  its  gcogTai)hic  center,  yet 
'the  dense  forest  never  broke  in  the  descent. 

"We  'II  meet  camp  jes'  now,"  said  Langrey  about  five  o'clock ;  and 
sure  enough  we  did  "meet"  it,  coming  up  river  along  with  the  endless 
procession  of  forest,  a  half-open  place,  with  some  of  the  most  mag- 
nificent trees  I  had  yet  seen.  It  was  near  here  that  a  boat  in  which 
"Harris"  had  been  steersman  and  Langrey  one  of  the  paddlers  had 
buried  the  last  white  man  who  had  attempted  the  overland  trip  from 
Manaos  to  Georgetown.  He  called  himself  Frederick  Weiland,  claim- 
ing to  be  an  American  born  in  Texas,  but  later  confessed  himself  a 
Hungarian,  and  therefore  subject,  as  an  enemy  alien,  to  internment  for 
the  duration  of  the  war.  He  had  left  Manaos  nine  months  before  and 
tried  to  walk  across  from  Boa  Vista  to  Melville's,  but  lost  himself  look- 
ing for  water,  and,  having  set  down  his  baggage,  could  not  find  it  again. 
For  three  days  he  wandered  at  random  without  food  and  almost  with- 
out drink,  until  half-wild  Indians  found  him  and  took  him  on  to 
Melville's,  who  was  then  in  Europe.  He  gave  himself  out  to  be  a  house- 
painter,  and  carried  many  collapsible  tubes  of  paints  and  pencil-brushes ; 
he  claimed  to  know  nothing  of  soldiering,  yet  he  had  a  military  manner 
and  his  talk  often  unconsciously  showed  knowledge  not  common  among 
workingmen.  Most  of  the  belongings  he  had  left  he  gave  the  Indians 
to  row  him  down  to  the  mouth  of  the  Rupununi,  where  the  Scotch- 
Irishman,  losing  no  chance  to  improve  his  official  importance,  sent 
negroes  out  to  his  camp  to  arrest  him  as  a  German  spy.  His  captor 
kept  him  for  a  while,  letting  him  paint  or  do  other  work  where  he 
could,  and  finally  started  down  to  town  with  him.  The  prisoner 
seemed  to  worry  much  as  to  what  might  happen  to  him  there,  though 
assured  that  at  worst  he  would  be  interned ;  but  he  was  gay  most  of  the 
way  down,  until  an  up-boat  gave  them  a  newspaper  that  reported  serious 
German  losses.  From  that  moment  he  seemed  to  lose  heart.  Some 
thought  he  swallowed  some  of  his  paints ;  at  any  rate,  he  suddenly 
"t'row  a  fit"  in  the  boat  one  afternoon,  and  an  hour  later  he  was  dead. 

"We  jes'  take  tea,"  concluded  Langrey ;  "den  we  dig  a  hole  an' 
put  he  in,  an'  get  in  de  boat  an'  gone." 

The  twentieth  of  June  was  badly  named  Sunday,  for  not  a  glimpse 
of  the  sun  did  we  get  all  day;  rather  was  it  a  most  miserable  Raindav, 
during  which  a  deluge  fell  incessantly,  leaving  us  cold  to  the  marrow 
and  cramped  beyond  endurance  most  of  the  time,  sneaking  along  streams 
raging  down  through  the  impenetrable  wilderness,  now  stripped  and 
letting  the  boat  down  over  rocks,  now  grabbing  from  branch  to  trunk 


548  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

along  the  shore,  always  in  more  or  less  immediate  danger  of  going  to 
destruction.  Luckily  I  had  "three  fingers"  of  hrandy  left  to  ward  ofif 
the  chill,  which  I  shared  with  Langrey.  The  law  forbids,  under  serious 
penalty,  giving  "fire-water"  to  Indians,  and  though  our  companions 
shivered  until  their  teeth  rattled,  I  complied  with  it,  for  the  "Protector 
of  the  Indians"  has  many  ways  of  detecting  violations.  At  the  be- 
ginning of  what  we  guessed  to  be  afternoon,  we  cooked  a  dismal  "break- 
fast" in  the  downpour,  and  were  barely  off  again  when  to  our  ears  was 
borne  the  loudest  roar  of  water  we  had  yet  heard.  This  time  it  was 
the  Itanamy  Falls,  about  which  there  is  a  negro  ballad  among  the 
popular  songs  of  Georgetown,  part  of  which  Langrey  chanted  as  we 
approached  them : 

It's  go'n'  drownded  me, 

An'  ah  ain'  come  back  no  mo', 

EE-tah-nah-meeee ! 

For  hours  we  fought  this  greatest  rapids  of  them  all,  struggling 
through  the  woods  by  roaring  branches,  over  rocks,  fallen  trees,  sudden 
falls,  and  a  hundred  dangers,  the  men  in  the  water  clinging  to  the 
boat,  when  we  were  not  "dropping  her  down"  backward  from  tree  to 
bush,  with  the  woman  and  our  baggage  in  it.  All  of  us  were  soaked 
and  weary  when  we  finally  camped  at  five  o'clock,  but  "Harris"  said 
we  not  only  had  passed  the  worst  part  of  the  river,  but  had  made  the 
longest  journey  over  it  in  one  day  that  he  had  ever  known.  In  the 
morning  I  found  that  an  army  of  wood-eating  ants  had  attacked  my 
wooden-framed  Brazilian  valise,  and  I  had  to  take  out  and  brush  every 
article  I  possessed,  to  the  expressionless  delight  of  the  Indians,  who, 
of  course,  had  been  dying  to  know  what  I  had  in  it.  As  these  ants 
eat  even  clothing,  extreme  vigilance  was  the  only  possible  way  of 
saving  what  I  had  spent  much  trouble,  time,  and  money  to  bring  from 
Manaos,  so  that  several  times  thereafter  I  had  to  spread  out  and 
repack  everything.  Truly,  the  Indian  who  travels  with  a  loin-cloth,  a 
hammock,  and  a  bow  and  arrows  is  best  accoutered  for  these  wilds. 
The  itching  of  old  insect  bites  was  augmented  now  by  what  I  at 
first  took  to  be  boils,  but  which  turned  out  to  be  tropical  ulcers,  to 
which  most  white  men  fighting  the  Amazonian  jungle  are  subject. 
Then  the  jiggers  I  had  gathered  on  the  walk  to  Melville's  ripened  daily, 
especially  with  the  feet  constantly  wet,  and  though  I  frequently  cut  new 
nests  of  them  open  and  squeezed  out  the  eggs,  my  feet  ached — "like 


STRUGGLING  DOWN  TO  GEORGETOWN  549 

ley  was  poundin'  you  wid  hammers  on  dc  haid,  yes,  sir,"  as  Langrey 
concisely  put  it — esix^cially  at  night,  rohbing  nie  of  sleep. 

Though  I  had  thought  they  were  over,  we  had  troubles  again  next 
day  from  the  start,  and  this  time  came  almost  to  disaster.  The  men 
were  letting  the  boat  down  over  a  raj^ids,  "Harris"  and  Langrey 
holding  it  and  my  three  worthless  Indians  clinging  to  the  chain  painter. 
At  the  crisis  of  the  falls  the  boys  were  told  to  let  go  the  chain  and 
leave  the  rest  to  the  pilot  and  the  negro,  as  quick  work  was  necessary. 
Instead,  finding  the  water  deep,  they  clung  to  the  chain  in  fear  and 
let  the  rushing  water  pour  into  the  boat  in  such  volume  that  only  by 
using  my  stentorian  voice  to  its  capacity  did  I  save  it  from  sinking  in 
another  five  seconds.  As  it  was,  the  baggage  was  filled  with  water, 
but  my  own  was  luckily  in  a  water-proof  bag.  Do  not  talk  to  me  of 
"brave  untamed  savages."  Those  Indian  boys,  though  big,  strong 
fellows,  were  the  most  unmitigated  cowards,  like  horses  in  their  sense- 
less fear,  compared  with  any  three  average  American  boys  of  the  same 
age,  who  would  have  considered  such  a  trip  a  lark. 

To  my  astonishment,  there  came  signs  of  the  end  sooner  than  I 
expected.  During  the  still  early  afternoon  of  the  fourtl:  day,  at  the 
last  bad  rock-and-boulder  falls,  below  two  convenient  portages  through 
the  woods,  we  met  a  big  new  "tent-boat,"  belonging  to  one  of  the 
"balata"  companies,  on  its  way  upstream.  There  was  an  Indian  crew 
of  twelve,  under  an  Indian  captain,  all  commanded  by  several  pompous 
negroes  sitting  comfortably  under  canvas  awnings,  dressed  in  ostenta- 
tious town  clothes  which  looked  unduly  ludicrous  here  in  the  untamed 
wilderness.  The  Indians  and  several  blacks,  all  but  naked,  were  in 
the  water  and  on  the  rocks,  struggling  to  drag  the  boat  upstream,  the 
most  burly  negro  under  the  awning  shouting,  as  we  sped  past,  to  a 
young  black  evidently  new  at  this  game,  "Keep  yo  nose  above  de 
watah,  mahn ;  den  yo  ain'  go'n'  drownded  !"  I  congratulated  myself  that 
I  was  traveling  down  rather  than  upstream.  Scarcely  an  hour  later,  a 
brilliant  sun  giving  the  broad,  placid  river  the  appearance  of  a  vast 
mirror,  \\c  sighted  the  "balata"  camps  at  the  mouth  of  the  Potaro,  and 
my  troubles  dropped  suddenly  from  me  like  cast-ofT  garments.  Two 
days  more,  by  launch,  train,  and  steamer,  would  carry  me  to  George- 
town, with  a  record,  rarely  equalled,  of  thirty-four  days  from  Manaos, 
which  I  could  perhaps  have  cut  considerably  shorter  by  not  having 
halted  with  Hart  or  Melville. 

Though  they  had  been  rather  sluggish  the  last  few  days,  the  sight 
of  the  end  caused  my  three  boys  to  paddle  so  hard  that  they  splashed 


550  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

water  into  the  boat  and  had  to  be  rebuked  for  their  enthusiasm.  As 
ue  drew  near  the  sheet-iron  buildings  at  the  mouth  of  the  black  branch 
river,  stretching  away  between  the  familiar  bluish,  unbroken  forest 
walls,  I  lived  over  again  th.e  pleasure  it  had  been  to  get  back  to  nature, 
and  beneath  my  joy  at  returning  to  civilization  and  entering  new 
scenes  was  an  undercurrent  of  regret  at  leaving  the  primitive  world  of 
gentle,  guileless  savages  behind  me — tempered,  to  be  sure,  by  curiosity 
to  know  what  the  other  world  had  been  doing  during  the  long  month  in 
which  I  had  not  heard  a  hint  of  news  from  it. 

Of  the  forty-nine  rations,  we  had  eaten  twelve,  the  Indians  generally 
preferring  their  own  food.  When  I  settled  up  with  them,  I  found  that 
even  in  their  own  tongue  they  used  not  only  the  words  "dollar"  and 
"cent,"  but  our  numbers,  no  doubt  to  save  themselves  from  their  own 
complicated  "one-hand-and-one-over-on-the-other-hand"  system.  "Vin- 
cent," interpreting  my  remarks  to  the  other  boys,  used  such  expressions 
as  "t'ree  dollar  fifty-seven  centes,"  which,  sounding  forth  suddenly  amid 
a  deluge  of  Indian  discourse,  were  almost  startling.  The  words  seemed 
to  have  little  more  than  an  academic  meaning  to  them,  however ;  such 
sums  as  two  shirts  and  a  pair  of  trousers  would  have  been  much  more 
comprehensible.  The  Indians  do  not  want  money,  but  the  government 
thinks  it  knows  what  is  best  for  them,  and  the  law  forbids  their  being 
paid  in  anything  else — though  there  are  easy  ways  to  circumvent  it. 
The  trip  from  Manaos  had  cost  me  about  eighty  dollars ;  it  might  have 
come  to  vastly  more  both  in  time  and  money. 

Several  days'  travel  vip  the  Potaro  are  the  Kaieteur  Falls,  four  hun- 
dred feet  wide  and  eight  hundred  and  twenty  feet  high,  loftiest  for 
their  width  in  the  world — unless  a  neighboring  cataract  recently  dis- 
covered by  Father  Cary-Elwess  proves  greater.  The  sight  of  these, 
thundering  along  in  the  heart  of  the  unknown  wilderness,  is  said  by 
the  few  who  have  viewed  them  to  be  impressive  in  a  way  that  civilized 
and  harnessed  Niagara  can  never  be  again.  But  it  would  almost  have 
doubled  my  time  in  British  Guiana  to  go  and  see  the  Potaro  take  its 
famous  plunge;  and  the  ever-increasing  call  of  home  was  urging  me 
to  hurry  on.  The  launch  that  came  down  the  branch  next  morning 
from  some  gold  mines  owned  by  Chinamen  was  a  filthy  old  craft  under 
a  negro  captain;  yet  anything  that  runs  daily  seemed  beautiful  in  this 
region.  I  took  Langrey  with  me ;  but  "Harris,"  with  the  instability 
of  his  race,  had  decided  after  all  not  to  "go  down  to  town,"  dreading 
the  great  metropolis,  perhaps,  as  some  of  our  own  countrymen  do  the 
rush  and  roar  of  Broadway.    Langrey  was  useful  to  cook  and  bring  me 


STRUGGLING  DOWN  TO  GEORGETOWN  55^ 

lunch  from  the  i)iivate  stores  I  had  left,  for  nothing  was  served  on 
the  launch  and  without  my  own  valet  and  servant  I  should  have  been 
considered  a  common  person  indeed.  We  plowed  the  placid,  tree- 
walled  Essequiho  without  a  pause  until  two  in  the  afternoon,  coming  to 
Jvockstonc,  a  bungalow  resthouse  on  stilts  surrounded  by  tall  grass  and 
the  forest,  where  I  not  only  had  a  real  meal  again,  but  slept  in  a  bed  for 
the  first  time  in  thirty-three  days — and  found  it  hard  and  uncomfortably 
high  in  the  middle.  I  was  the  star  guest  at  the  Rockstone  hotel,  not 
merely  being  the  only  white  man,  but  because— if  so  incredible  a 
.statement  could  be  believed— I  had  arrived  without  ever  having  been 
in  Georgetown,  making  me  as  awesome  a  curiosity  as  if  I  had  suddenly 
crawled  out  of  a  hole  from  China.  Rare,  indeed,  are  the  travelers  who 
enter  the  Guianas  by  the  back  door. 

A  little  train  with  a  screeching  English  engine  and  half  a  passenger- 
car  rambled  away  next  morning  through  forest  and  white-sand  jungle, 
the  charred  trunks  of  trees  standing  above  it  and  several  branch  lines 
pushing  their  way  out  in  quest  of  the  valuable  green-heart  timber. 
W'ithin  an  liour  we  were  at  Wismar  on  the  Demerara  River,  a  small 
stream  compared  with  the  great  Essequiho,  about  the  width  of  the 
Thames  and  barely  two  hundred  and  fifty  miles  long.  I  had  passed, 
too,  from  the  mammoth  County  of  Essequiho,  forming  more  than  two 
thirds  of  British  Guiana,  to  the  comparatively  tiny  one  of  Demerara, 
containing  the  capital  and  often  giving  its  name  to  the  whole  colony, 
which  is  completed  by  the  several  times  larger  County  of  Berbice  on 
the  east.  The  colony  was  first  settled  along  the  three  large  rivers 
which  drain  it,  and  the  counties  took  their  names  from  them.  The 
Lady  Longdcn,  a  river-steamer  that  seemed  luxurious  against  the  back- 
ground of  wilderness  travel  behind  me,  descended  a  stream  yellowish- 
black  in  color,  like  most  of  the  inhabitants,  Indian  features  had  almost 
completely  disappeared,  though  the  mixture  of  races  was  perhaps 
greater  than  in  Brazil.  Besides  the  ubiquitous  West  Indian  negroes, 
with  their  tin  bracelets  and  their  childish  prattle,  there  were  many 
Chinamen  and  Hindus.  Celestials  so  Anglicized  that  they  could  not 
speak  a  word  of  Chinese— though  one  surely  could  not  praise  the 
English  of  most  of  them— mingled  on  the  wharves  (here  called  "stell- 
ings")  with  East  Indians  dressed  in  evervihing  from  their  original  home 
costumes  to  the  complete  European  garb  of  those  born  in  the  colony. 
Chinese  women  in  blue  cotton  blouse  and  trousers,  exactly  as  in  China, 
came  down  to  see  off  sons  and  daughters  dressed  like  summer  strollers 
along  Piccadilly,  and  who  carried  under  an  arm  the  latest  cheap  F.nglish 


552  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

magazine.  It  startled  me  constantly  to  hear  English  spoken  around  me, 
not  only  by  those  I  subconsciously  expected  to  speak  Portuguese  or 
some  other  foreign  tongue,  but  by  ragged  negroes  who  caried  the  mind 
back  to  Brazil,  by  East  Indians,  and  by  broken-down  Chinamen  lying 
about  the  "stellings.'' 

For  the  first  time  the  country  was  really  inhabited,  with  frequent 
towns  breaking  the  forest  wall  and  sometimes  a  constant  succession  of 
bungalows,  siiacks,  and  churches,  all  built  of  wood  and  having  an 
unmistakable  Anglo-Saxon  ancestry.  As  in  Brazil,  the  seacoest  of  the 
Guianas  holds  the  overwhelming  majority  of  the  population.  Every 
few  miles  we  whistled  and  slowed  up  before  a  village,  often  half 
hidden  back  in  the  bush,  with  only  a  few  canoe  "garages"  on  the  water- 
front, to  pick  up  from,  or  toss  into,  a  "curial"  paddled  by  blacks, 
Chinese,  or  Hindu  coolies  a  passenger  or  two,  a  trunk,  or  a  letter.  We 
saw  a  great  many  of  these  Guianese  dugouts  during  the  day,  the  negroes 
using  any  old  rag  as  sails  to  save  themselves  the  labor  of  paddling  up- 
stream, so  that  some  were  wafted  along  by  former  flour-sacks  and  others 
by  what  had  undoubtedly  once  been  trousers.  Several  times  we  over- 
took rafts  of  green-heart  logs  lashed  to  some  lighter  wood,  as  green- 
heart  will  not  float,  with  whole  families  living  in  the  improvised  boat- 
houses  in  the  center  of  them.  Even  before  we  sighted  Georgetown  I 
had  undoubtedly  seen  more  human  beings  in  one  day  than  during  all  the 
rest  of  my  time  in  British  Guiana. 

The  river  grew  ever  broader,  its  immediate  shores  more  swampy 
and  less  inhabited,  with  an  intertangle  of  mangrove  roots  that  showed 
the  mark  of  the  tides.  Cocoanut-palms  appeared  again,  for  the  first 
time  since  leaving  Para ;  then  an  occasional  royal  palm  and  the  belching 
smokestack  of  a  sugar  plantation,  of  which  many  on  this  coast  have 
been  cultivated  continuously  for  a  hundred  years,  yet  which  rarely 
stretch  more  than  ten  miles  up  country.  An  ocean  breeze  began  to  fan 
us ;  down  the  now  wide  and  yellow  river  appeared  a  blue  patch  of 
open  sea.  Makeshift  tin  and  wooden  shacks  commenced  to  peer  forth 
from  the  bush,  which  itself  gradually  turned  to  banana  patches,  and 
suddenly,  about  four  o'clock,  Georgetown  burst  forth  on  a  low  nose  of 
ground  at  the  river's  mouth.  Though  it  seemed  to  jut  out  into  the  sea 
on  a  point  of  jungle  shaped  like  a  plowshare,  there  certainly  was  little 
inspiring  about  the  approach  to  it — a  low,  flat  city,  as  unlike  the  towns 
I  had  so  often  come  upon  in  the  past  three  years  as  the  smooth,  kempt 
hills  of  England  are  like  the  picturesque  helter-skelter  of  a  half-cleared 
South  American  wilderness. 


STRUGGLING  DOWN  TO  GEORGETi)WN  553 

As  to  a  hotel,  I  had  been  rccoiiinicndcd  to  the  "Ice-House,"  which 
seemed  so  strikingly  appropriate  to  the  climate  that  it  was  with  genuine 
grief  that  I  gave  it  up.  But  it  turned  out  that  it  housed  negroes  also, 
and  one's  caste  nui.t  he  kc[)t  up  in  British  (juiana,  even  though  one  pay 
several  times  as  much  for  the  privilege.  In  the  most  exclusive  hotel  a 
negro  servant  came  to  look  me  over  when  I  applied,  and  to  report  on 
the  color  of  my  skin  and  my  general  appearance  before  the  white 
manager  came  to  repeat  the  inspection  while  I  stood  gloating  over  an 
armful  of  mail.  Then  with  an  awed  whisper  of  "All  right,  sir,"  the 
servant  led  me  to  a  chamber — which,  after  all  the  fuss,  was  not  inordi- 
nately luxurious — turned  on  the  electric-light  and  backed  away,  asking 
whetlier  "de  gentleman"  desired  hot  water. 

"Hot  water  ?"  I  exclaimed,  my  thoughts  on  my  correspondence. 

"Fo'  yo'  shavin',  sah,"  replied  the  model  servant. 

Verily,  I  had  wholly  forgotten  many  of  the  common  luxuries  of 
Anglo-Saxon  civilization. 


CHAPTER  XXI 


ROAMING   THE    THREE    GUIANAS 


THE  white  steamers  of  the  "Compagnie  Generale  Transatlantique" 
take  two  leisurely  days  from  Georgetown  to  Cayenne,  which  I 
spent  in  furbishing  up  my  long  unused  French.  I  had  not 
intended  to  leave  British  Guiana  so  soon,  but  it  would  still  be  there 
when  I  came  back  and  transportation  between  the  three  European 
colonies  of  South  America  is  not  frequent  enough  to  scorn  any  passing 
chance  with  impunity.  Four  typical  Frenchmen  of  the  tropics,  in 
pointed  beards  not  recently  trimmed  and  the  white  toadstool  helmets 
without  which  they  would  no  more  expect  to  survive  than  if  they  left 
off  their  flannel  waist-bands,  put  themselves,  unasked,  at  my  disposal. 
It  was  still  dark  on  the  second  morning  when  there  loomed  out  of  the 
tropical  night  three  isolated  granite  rocks,  with  what  was  evidently  a 
thin  covering  of  grass  and  bush  and  dotted  with  scattered  lights. 
Their  official  name  is  "Isles  du  Salut,"  but  the  more  popular  and 
€xact  term  for  the  whole  group  is  that  properly  belonging  to  one  of 
them — "Devil's  Island."  The  water  about  them  is  very  deep,  and  our 
ship  went  close  inshore.  Soon  two  boatloads  of  people,  rowed  by 
■deeply  sunburned  white  prisoners  in  the  tam-o'-shanter  caps  of  Latin 
Quarter  studios,  appeared  through  the  growing  dawn,  tumbled  a  few 
passengers  and  the  baggage  of  a  family  from  Paris  aboard  us,  then 
the  commander  of  the  isles  and  his  kin  and  cronies  were  rowed  back 
again  from  their  monthly  excursion  to  the  outside  world. 

Just  two  hours  later  we  stopped  far  out  near  a  lighthouse  on  a  rock 
called  the  Enfant  Perdu,  a  low  coast  with  some  wooded  hills  and  a 
rather  insignificant  looking  town  several  miles  off.  The  water  was 
already  yellowish-brown,  and  there  was  not  enough  of  it  to  allow  the 
steamer  to  draw  nearer.  Launches  and  barges  finally  tied  up  alongside 
us  and,  with  the  usual  chaotic  volubility  of  Latins,  the  considerably 
tar-brushed  crowd  of  arrivals  fought  their  way  Into  them.  With  us 
were  eight  prisoners,  four  of  them  pasty-white,  but  tough-faced  apaches 
from  Paris,  still  in  their  heavy  civilian  garments,  each  with  a  bag  over 
his   shoulder;   the   rest   were    evil-eyed   negroes    from    other    French 

554 


ROAMING  THE  THREE  GUIANAS  555 

colonies,  already  in  prison  garb.  We  chug-chugged  for  nearly  an  hour 
toward  what  seemed  to  be  a  scattered  village  on  a  slight  knoll,  largely 
hidden  by  trees,  a  big,  box-like  yellow  building  which  my  mentors  said 
was  the  Colonial  Infantry  barracks  conspicuous  in  the  foreground 
among  royal  palms.  Cayenne  is  the  best  port  in  French  Guiana,  yet 
even  the  launch  could  not  reach  the  shore,  but  tumbled  us  into  row- 
boats  manipulated  by  impudent,  patois-chattering  blacks,  to  whom  we 
paid  a  franc  each  to  be  set  across  the  fifteen  feet  of  mud  remaining 
Once  there  was  a  landing  jetty  here,  but  the  sea  carried  it  away  and 
the  tropical  Frenchmen  had  not  yet  been  moved  to  carry  it  back.  Our 
baggage  was  inspected  as  if  we,  too,  were  incoming  convicts,  but  as  I 
had  luckily  left  most  of  my  own,  including  my  revolver,  in  Georgetown, 
the  haughty  black  officials  could  not  trump  up  any  just  cause  to  refuse 
me  admission  to  the  colony. 

I  had  expected  to  find  Cayenne  a  less  model  place  than  Georgetown, 
but  the  glaring  reality  was  beyond  my  worst  dreams.  One  would  have 
to  go  back  to  the  West  Coast,  to  such  places  as  Popayan  and  Quito,  to 
find  anything  approaching  this.  It  showed  at  a  glance  why  the  French 
failed  at  Panama,  what  Colon  and  Panama  City  would  still  have  been 
had  not  Uncle  Sam  taken  them  in  hand.  Indeed,  the  wide  streets  of 
crushed  stone  and  earth  lined  by  rows  of  noisome  two-  or  three-story 
wooden  houses  gave  the  place  considerable  resemblance  to  those  cities 
before  the  Americans  came,  the  general  appearance  of  a  negro  slum 
in  the  dirtiest  of  our  cities,  with  all  the  sanitary  laws  ignored.  Built  on 
a  shallow  mud  shore  among  jungle  brush  into  which  all  but  a  few  of 
its  streets  quickly  disappear,  with  swamps  and  moscjuito  breeding-places 
overgrown  with  unkempt  vegetation  in  the  town  itself,  it  is  everywhere 
a  rubbish  heap.  Little  advantage  has  been  taken  of  the  riches  of 
nature ;  even  the  strip  of  land  between  town  and  sea,  which  a  progressive 
people  would  have  turned  into  a  blessing,  is  a  constant  litter  of  filth. 
Cesspools  abound ;  there  is  dirt  in  every  hole,  corner,  or  place  enough 
out  of  the  way  so  that  daily  movements  do  not  inadvertently  keep  it 
clean;  carrion  crows  are  the  only  members  of  the  street-cleaning  de- 
partment, except  two  decrepit  old  women  armed  with  brush  brooms. 
The  conglomeration  of  odors  is  beyond  description;  nothing  seems  to 
be  regularly  kept  in  repair,  so  that  even  the  most  recent  buildings  have 
already  a  dilapidated  aspect.  Some  of  the  larger  houses  have  mud- 
plastered  fa(;ades  to  imply  wealth  or  importance  within,  yet  every 
residence  I  entered  was  visibly  unclean,  and  men  whom  in  other  climes 
one  would  expect  to  find  in  spick  and  span  surroundings  here  lived  in 


556  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

noisome  holes  that  one  shudclered  to  enter.  Out  of  doors  every  imag- 
inable iniquity  against  sanitation  is  committed  with  impunity,  and  one 
is  not  surprised  to  learn  that  epidemics  are  frequent  and  that  the  death 
rate  exceeds  that  of  births,*  though  the  native  population  is  notoriously 
industrious,  irrespective  of  age  or  marriage  vows,  in  the  reproduction 
of  its  uncommendable  species. 

Here  the  traveler,  though  he  be  rolling  in  wealth,  will  see  what  the 
man  with  only  ten  cents  for  lodging  is  forced  to  endure.  I  told  the 
negro  boy  carrying  my  bundle  to  lead  me  to  the  best  hotel,  whereupon 
he  gave  me  a  leer  of  mingled  stupidity  and  insolence  and  turned  in  at 
a  miserable  tavern  of  the  kind  to  be  found  in  French  slums,  kept  by 
negroes  into  the  bargain.  The  wench  behind  the  dirty  counter  admitted 
that  she  had  one  room  and  that  she  "could  cook  for  me"— any  susceptible 
person  would  have  fainted  to  see  where  and  how.  The  room  turned  out 
to  be  an  incredibly  filthy  hole  up  under  the  baking  roof,  with  a  nest 
of  ancient  mattresses,  visibly  containing  all  the  iniquities  of  half  a 
century,  on  a  wooden  platform-bedstead.  When  I  protested,  my  guide 
assured  me  with  a  gesture  of  indifference  that  it  was  the  best  in  town, 
whereupon  I  dismissed  him,  determined  to  sleep  under  the  royal  palms 
in  the  high  grass  of  the  pleasant,  though  astonishingly  unkempt,  central 
Place  dcs  Palmist es  unless  I  could  find  better  than  this.  There  were 
"Chambres  a  louer"  signs  all  over  town ;  but  though  everyone  seemed 
anxious  to  rent  rooms,  none  would  clean  them.  I  found  at  last  a  negro 
woman  who  offered  to  let  me  have  her  own  room,  reached  by  a  noisome 
stairway,  but  on  a  corner,  with  four  windows  making  it  as  airy  as  one 
could  expect  in  Cayenne,  v/ith  its  ridiculous  clinging  to  the  European 
style  of  architecture  so  unfitted  to  the  tropics.  The  room  was  cluttered 
with  rocking-chairs,  tables,  kerosene  lamps,  and  all  the  gaudy,  worthless 
rubbish  beloved  of  negroes, — photographs,  porcelain  dolls,  bric-a-brac — 
until  it  was  impossible  to  make  a  sudden  movement  without  knocking 
down  something  or  other.  A  corner  was  partitioned  off  with  paper  to 
form  a  wash-room  with  entirely  inadequate  washing  facilities,  and 
everything  had  an  air  about  it  which  made  one  hesitate  to  sit  down  or 
even  to  touch  anything.  Everything  in  plain  sight  in  the  room  looked 
clean  enough,  for  the  usual  occupant  prided  herself  on  being  of  the 
Cayenne  aristocracy ;  it  was  only  when  one  began  to  peer  into  or  under 
things,  to  move  anything,  that  the  negro's  lazy  indifference  to  real 
cleanliness  came  out.  The  enormous  bedstead  of  what  ai)peared  to  be 
mahogany  had  five  huge  mattresses,  one  on  top  of  the  other  ;  all  of  them. 
it  turned  out,  were  ragged  nests  of  filth,  except  the  uppermost,  and  the 


ROAMIXG  THE  THREE  GUIANAS  557 

bed  was  so  humped  in  tlie  middle  tliat  it  was  impossible  lo  lie  on  it. 
Evidently  it  had  been  made  so  purposely,  for  I  found  great  bunches 
of  rags  and  wornout  clothing  stuffed  into  the  middle  of  the  various 
mattresses,  which  the  owner  had  evidently  found  it  to  much  trouble  to 
throw  out  when  a  new  one  was  indisi)ensable. 

The  yard  below,  always  rolling  and  howling  with  piccanninies  of  all 
sizes,  had  a  hole  in  the  "kitchen"  where  one  might  throw  water  over 
oneself  with  a  cocoanut-shell,  if  one  insisted — unless  it  happened  to 
be  between  three  in  the  afternoon  and  seven  the  next  morning,  when 
the  request  for  a  bath  brought  a  scornful  sneer  at  one's  ignorance  of 
the  hours  of  the  Cayenne  waterworks.  In  a  ground-floor  room,  look- 
ing like  an  old  curiosity  shop  kept  by  a  negro  under  penalty  not  to  use 
a  broom  or  a  dust-cloth  for  a  century,  was  a  rickety  table  on  which  I 
ate  amid  the  incessant  hubbub  and  rumpus  of  Galicized  negro  women. 
Their  "French"  was  a  most  distressing  caricature  of  that  language,  and 
they  could  never  talk  of  the  simplest  things  without  giving  a  stranger 
the  impression  that  they  were  engaged  in  a  violent  quarrel  that  would 
soon  lead  to  bloodshed.  Virtually  every  negro  woman — and  one  rarely 
sees  any  others  of  the  sex  in  Cayenne — wears  a  loose  cotton  gown  of 
striking  figures  and  colors,  and  a  turban  headdress  of  general  similarity, 
yet  always  distinctly  individual,  a  little  point  of  cloth,  like  a  rabbit's 
ear,  rising  above  its  complicated  folds.  In  theory  the  turban  is  wound 
every  day,  but  in  practice  that  would  mean  to  much  exertion,  and  it  is 
set  on  a  sort  of  mould.  For  the  market-women  and  those  habitually 
out  in  the  gruelling  sunshine  there  are  sunshades  of  woven  palm-leaves, 
large  as  umbrellas,  but  worn  as  hats. 

The  town  claims  13,000  inhabitants,  which  possibly  may  have  been 
true  before  the  World  War  drained  it  of  much  of  its  manhood;  yet 
with  the  exception  of  high  government  officials,  soldiers,  convicts,  and 
libcrcs,  there  are  very  few  whites.  In  fact,  French  Guiana  is  so  emi- 
nently a  negro  country  that  unless  one  is  a  high  government  official  one 
is  out  of  place  in  it  as  a  white  man ;  others  of  that  color  seem  to  the 
thick-skulled  natives  to  be  outcasts  who  have  come  there  more  or 
less  against  their  will.  The  few  white  women  are  seen  only  after 
sunset  and  along  the  few  shaded  avenues,  and  white  children  do  not 
seem  to  thrive.  The  social  morals  of  the  colony  are  admittedly  low, 
and  influences  are  so  bad  that  even  whites  of  the  most  protected  class 
assert  that  they  must  send  their  girls  away  as  children  or  all  will  be 
lost.  The  Cayenne  negro  is  not  only  dirty,  impudent,  and  sulky,  but 
forward  and  presumptuous,  constantly  striving  by  such  manners  to 


S58  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

impose  upon  the  whites  the  superiority  he  feels,  or  pretends  to  teel, 
over  them.  French  residents  treat  the  negroes  with  deplorable  familiar- 
ity and  equality,  many  a  white  man  obsequiously  taking  off  his  hat  to 
haughty  colored  officials,  who  accept  the  homage  with  a  scornfully 
indifferent  air.  I  called  one  day  on  the  mulatto  editor  of  the  local  daily 
newspaper — of  the  size  of  a  handbill,  taken  up  entirely  with  advertise- 
ments on  one  side,  and  on  the  other  chiefly  with  the  names  of  negroes 
ordered  to  the  front.  Together  we  went  to  call  upon  the  colored  aide 
of  the  governor,  both  editor  and  aide  treating  me  with  a  patronizing 
air  and  a  haughty  manner  which  said  plainly  that,  while  I  might  be 
officially  a  "distinguished  foreigner,"  I  v/as,  at  best,  considerably 
lower  in  the  social  scale  than  men  of  their  color.  Suddenly  there  was 
a  swish  of  silk  skirts  at  the  door  behind  me.  All  of  us  sprang  to  atten- 
tion— when  into  the  room,  with  a  manner  that  might  have  been  borrowed 
from  Marie  Antoinette  herself,  swept  the  Parisian-gowned  negro  wife 
of  the  aide,  whose  bejewelled  hand  every  other  man  in  the  room,  in- 
cluding two  white  Frenchmen,  proceeded  to  kiss. 

The  usual  indifference  and  inefficiency  of  Latin  public  officials  is  to 
be  expected  in  Cayenne.  Public  employees  have  a  certain  superficial 
French  courtesy,  but  with  it  even  more  than  the  Frenchman's  gift  for 
red  tape  and  procrastination.  One  ordinarily  stands  half  an  hour  before 
a  post-office  window  to  buy  a  stamp,  and  the  distribution  of  the  mails 
rarely  begins  within  twenty-four  hours  of  their  arrival.  There  is  no 
bookstore  in  the  colony,  except  that  a  Jewish  ex-convict  rents  lurid 
tales  of  bloodshed ;  and  though  there  is  a  public  library,  it  is  open  only 
from  6  to  7:30  four  evenings  a  week  and  is  never  crowded  then. 
Though  it  lacks  many  such  things,  the  town  has  several  elaborate 
fountains — most  of  which  fail  to  fount — and  more  than  a  fair  share  of 
statues — another  proof,  I  suppose,  that  Latins  are  artistic.  The  place 
makes  one  wonder  whether  the  English  are  good  colonizers  because 
their  calm  self-control  has  a  sobering  effect  on  primitive  races,  whose 
passions  are  always  near  the  surface,  while  the  French,  the  Latins  in 
general,  are  poor  colonizers  because  they  are  emotional  and  lack  full 
control  of  their  own  passions,  thereby  making  the  wild  race  worse  by 
influence  and  example. 

Out  under  a  grove  of  trees  in  the  outskirts  white  French  officers 
were  putting  negro  youths  through  the  manual  of  arms.  "They  don't 
want  to  go  and  defend  their  country  (patrie),  the  poltroons,"  sneered 
the  officer  who  had  come  out  with  me ;  but  conscription  is  as  stern  as 
in  France,  so  that  hundreds  were  being  trained  for  a  month  or  more 


ROAMING  THE  THREE  GUIANAS  559 

and  shipped  to  Europe  by  each  French  Mail.  The  laws  of  France 
apply  only  to  three  of  her  colonies, — Martini(|ue,  Guadeloupe,  and 
Reunion;  Cayenne,  though  it  has  a  representative  in  the  Chamber  of 
Deputies,  is  ruled  by  decrees  and  a  governor  sent  out  from  Paris. 
Perhaps  it  is  this  spirit  of  centralization  which  causes  the  clocks  of 
the  colony  to  be  so  set  that  at  six  in  the  evening  it  is  dark  and  at  six  in 
the  morning  the  sun  is  high  and  hot.  The  local  bank  issues  notes  on 
poor  paper  of  from  five  francs  up ;  otherwise  the  money  of  France  is 
used,  except  the  "smacky"  (which  is  what  has  become  of  the  words 
"sou  marque"  in  the  mouth  of  the  illiterate  negro),  a  local  ten-centime 
piece  made — one  could  hardly  say  coined — in  1818  and  resembling  worn- 
out  tobacco  tags,  used  interchangeably  with  the  big  two-sou  pieces  of 
France. 

I  went  one  evening  to  a  "Benefit  Concert"  at  the  Casino,  a  barn- 
like board  structure  recalling  the  "Polytheamas"  of  Brazil,  where  local 
talent  gave  a  performance  in  aid  of  those  left  behind  by  the  men  who 
had  gone  to  war.  The  entertainment  began  at  8:30 — in  French  style, 
.so  it  was  nine  even  by  Cayenne  clocks  and  really  near  midnight  when 
the  curtain  finally  rose.  The  governor,  a  Frenchman  with  a  white 
goatee,  sat  with  the  elected  town  mayor  and  other  authorities,  all  of 
more  or  less  negro  ancestry  and  wearing  the  same  Gallic  facial  decora- 
lion,  as  well  as  haughty  official  expressions.  There  was  no  heavy 
formal  evening  dress,  as  in  Brazil,  but  mostly  white  duck,  which  is 
taboo  for  men  of  standing  in  the  big  land  to  the  south.  Every  shade  of 
black  to  w^hite  humanity  was  hobnobbing  like  intimate  friends.  It  gave 
one  a  creepy  feeling  to  see  dainty  French  demoiselles  entertaining 
not  only  elaborately  dressed  men  of  color  but  jet  black  men — though 
personally  I  prefer  the  full  black.  The  entertainment,  chiefly  musical, 
was  produced  by  the  local  talent  left  in  the  colony,  particularly  by  a 
trump  of  a  white  girl  of  scarcely  eighteen,  who  not  only  made  up  more 
than  half  the  show  but  carried  herself  unerringly  through  several  trying 
situations.  For  example,  she  played  the  heroine  in  a  silly  little  local 
drama,  and  as  the  departure  of  most  of  the  white  men  for  the  war  had 
left  them  hard  up  for  heroes,  it  became  her  duty  in  a  particularly 
emotional  and  tragic  love  scene,  with  a  speech  about  "your  beloved 
wavy  locks,"  to  lay  her  dainty  hand  lovingly  on  the  bald  pate  of  a 
dumpy  lump  of  a  man  beyond  fifty,  the  ridiculousness  whereof  caused 
even  the  Latinized  audience  to  burst  forth  in  laughter.  It  seemed  to 
be  the  Cayenne  system  for  all  white  French  residents  who  had  been 
called  to  the  front  to  leave  their  women  behind  at  the  mercv  of  the 


56o  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

negroes,  economically  and  otherwise.  Some  had  been  given  minor 
government  positions,  such  as  in  the  post-office,  never  before  filled  here 
by  members  of  their  sex;  but  as  the  sternness  of  Penelope  is  not 
characteristic  of  hard-pressed  Gallic  womanhood,  and  the  French  color- 
line  faint,  certain  conditions  had  already  grown  up  that  would  not 
have  been  tolerated  in  an  American  community. 

The  former  inhabitants  of  Cayenne  called  it  Moccumbro.  An  expe- 
dition financed  by  merchants  of  Rouen  landed  on  the  coast  in  1604,  and 
more  or  less  successful  attempts  were  made  during  the  next  half  century 
to  establish  colonies  there.  Holland  held  the  territory  for  a  time,  as 
she  did  most  of  the  northeastern  coast  of  South  America,  and  gradually 
the  claims  of  the  French  on  that  continent  shrank  to  their  present 
insignificance,  as  in  the  rest  of  the  New  World.  About  1660,  colonists 
stole  fourteen  negroes  from  a  traveler  along  the  coast  and  established 
African  slavery.  Twelve  thousand  French  immigrants  came  out  in 
1763,  but  no  preparations  had  been  made  to  help  them  endure  tropical 
life,  and  only  two  thousand  survivors  returned  in  a  sad  state  to  France. 
The  slaves  were  freed  by  the  French  Revolution ;  and  the  Convention, 
and  later  the  Directorate,  sent  out  deportcs  to  take  their  place ;  but  with 
Napoleon  slavery  was  revived.  Portugal  held  the  colony  from  1809 
to  1817,  "luckily,"  a  local  school-book  puts  it,  "for  if  it  had  been  taken 
by  Portugal's  ally,  England,  it  would  never  have  been  given  back." 
Finally,  in  1848,  complete  emancipation  of  all  slaves  in  "French 
America"  followed  the  introduction  of  a  resolution  in  the  French  con- 
gress by  Schoelcher — a  statue  of  whom  decorates  Cayenne — and  the 
colony,  by  admission  even  of  its  own  people,  has  vegetated  ever  since. 
Naturally  the  liberated  slaves  took  at  once  to  the  bush,  built  themselves 
rude  shelters,  and  settled  down  to  eat  bananas  and  mandioca  and  pro- 
lifically  to  multiply.  The  discovery  of  gold  and  the  promise  of  quick 
fortune  in  the  placer  mines  of  the  interior  for  the  few  w^ho  cared  to 
exert  themselves  was  the  final  straw  that  broke  the  back  of  agriculture 
in  French  Guiana. 

In  1 89 1  the  Czar  of  Russia  established  the  boundary  between  French 
and  Dutch  Guiana  at  the  Maroni  and  Awa  Rivers,  and  in  1900  the 
Swiss  president  named  the  Ayapoc  as  the  frontier  of  Brazil,  leaving 
the  French  about  one  fourth  the  territory  they  had  claimed.  At  that, 
they  have  no  definite  conception  of  its  extent,  most  of  it  being  virgin 
forest  unexplored  by  civilized  man.  Though  in  theory  it  runs  far  back 
to  the  plateau  and  watershed  of  Tumac-Humac,  France  has  no  real  hold 
over  more  than  a  comparatively  narrow  strip  of  coast.     The  colony 


ROAMING  THE  THREE  GUIANAS  561 

claims  30,000  inhabitants,  viriually  all  of  whom  live  within  cannon-shot 
of  the  sea.  Alcohol  has  clone  for  the  aborigines,  except  a  degenerate 
tribe  called  the  Galibis  back  in  the  interior,  estimated  by  the  latest 
census  as  534  in  number,  and  there  are  some  three  thousand  "boschs" 
or  "bonis,"  wild  negroes  descended  from  runaway  slaves.  The  few 
towns  besides  Cayenne  are  insignificant,  and  in  most  cases  have  scarcely 
half  as  many  inhabitants  as  a  century  ago.  In  those  days  of  plentiful 
slave  labor  there  were  sugar  plantations,  spice  trees,  and  prosperous 
estates  along  all  the  coast  from  the  Ayapoc  to  the  Maroni,  and  many 
ships  carried  to  France  sugar,  rum,  cacao,  cofTee,  indigo,  and  cotton. 
Then  there  were  more  than  20,000  field  laborers  alone;  to-day  there 
are  barely  two  thousand  loafing  tillers  of  the  soil  scattered  about  the 
colony,  and  agriculture  in  French  Guiana  is  a  blank.  Once  many  cattle 
were  introduced ;  now  there  are  none  left  and  even  milk  for  babies 
comes  from  the  North  in  tin  cans.  As  a  native  editor  puts  it,  "A 
country  placed  on  a  burning  soil,  swampy  and  unhealthful,  where 
paludic  fevers,  plague,  and  elephantiasis  abound,  needs  the  patience  of 
the  Hollander  to  become  such  a  prosperous  colony  as  our  neighbor 
on  the  west."  Ambitious  projects  for  opening  up  the  country  have 
been  formed,  but  there  has  been  much  promise  and  little  accomplish- 
ment. Sixty  kilometers  of  French  highways  stretch  out  in  all  directions 
from  Cayenne,  passing  simple  dwellings  and  careless  gardens  peering 
forth  from  the  bush;  but  these  are  the  only  roads  passable  the  year 
round  and  soon  die  out  in  the  untamed  wilderness.  Even  what  were 
good  roads  a  century  ago  have  in  many  cases  become  mere  paths,  or 
have  completely  grown  up  to  jungle  again.  The  native  inhabitants  are 
content  to  live  on  cassava — which  now  suffers  severely  from  a  big  red 
ant  called  the  fourmi-manioc — and  foreign  capital  shuns  a  Latin  gov- 
ernment and  a  penal  colony;  indeed,  the  negro  inhabitants  complain 
that  the  coming  of  the  convicts  ruined  their  "invaluable"  country, 
though  it  would  still  be  prosperous  "if  there  were  any  arms  to  do  the 
work,"  they  add,  at  the  same  time  completely  overlooking  the  idle  arms 
hanging  on  either  side  of  each  of  them. 

Cayenne  is  known  in  France  as  the  "dry  guillotine."  In  the  middle 
of  the  last  century,  soon  after  the  abolition  of  slavery,  some  French 
idealist,  or  practical  joker,  thought  of  a  plan  to  kill  two  birds  with 
one  stone.  Cayenne  needed  laborers;  France  was  overrun  with 
criminals.  Jean  Jacques  Rousseau  had  asserted  that  "Every  man  was 
born  good ;  it  is  society  which  inculcates  in  him  the  germ  of  all  his  vices 
and  defects,  and  as  he  is  also  essentially  corrigible,  he  m.ust  be  offered 


562  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

meaus  to  redeem  himself.''  The  betterment  and  regeneration  of 
criminals  by  work  was  the  panacea  of  the  day,  and  this  idea,  "more  or 
less  modified/'  inspired  the  establishment,  in  1854,  of  the  present  pene- 
tentiary  system.  It  is  not  likely  that  the  hard-headed,  materialistic 
statesmen  of  France  took  the  prattle  of  theorists  seriously ;  but  it  opened 
up  to  them  a  possible  way  out  of  certain  troublesome  perplexities.  In 
1851,  therefore,  the  French  president  issued  a  decree  prescribing  the 
*'use  of  convicts  in  the  progress  of  French  colonization,"  and  appointed 
a  committee  to  decide  to  which  colony  six  thousand  forcats  in  the 
crowded  hagncs  of  Toulon,  Brest,  and  Rochefort  should  be  sent,  Guy- 
ane  was  chosen,  with  "Devil's  Island"  as  a  landing-place,  and  the  fol- 
lowing year  volunteers  were  called  for  among  the  inmates  of  those  in- 
stitutions. More  than  three  thousand  offered  to  go  to  Cayenne — and 
soon  deeply  regretted  it.  Way  down  under  its  superficial  buncombe  the 
chief  purpose  of  the  plan,  of  course,  was  to  give  the  government  a 
means  of  getting  rid  of  its  radical  enemies  and  all  those  whose  presence 
at  home  greatly  worried  the  ruling  powers,  and  to-day  old  J.  J.  Rous- 
seau would  be  delighted  to  see  how  man,  essentially  good,  is  regenerated 
and  recovers  his  manly  dignity  at  Cayenne. 

During  the  second  year  of  the  plan,  volunteers  became  insufficient, 
and  new  decrees  ordered  all  individuals  sentenced  to  hard  labor  or 
reclusion,  or  criminals  of  African  or  Asiatic  origin,  to  be  sent  to  Guiana 
and  used  in  "les  traxaux  les  plus  penibles"  of  the  colony  and  its  public 
works.  This  last  clause,  at  least,  has  been  manfully  carried  out.  At 
the  same  time  a  penal  colony  was  established  in  Algeria,  but  the  latter 
proved  too  strong  to  have  its  protests  unheeded  and  tlie  onus  was 
transferred  to  New  Caledonia.  The  first  law  of  deportation  was  for 
not  less  than  five  and  not  more  than  ten  years.  Causes  for  such  a  fate 
included  conviction  of  belonging  to  a  secret  society.  Then  New  Cale- 
donia was  limited  to  those  prisoners  of  European  race  sentenced  to 
less  than  eight  years.  All  others,  of  longer  terms  or  of  the  negro  or  Arab 
race,  as  well  as  all  relegues  and  recidivists,  were  to  be  sent  to  Cayenne. 
Of  late  years  New  Caledonia  has  become  less  and  less  popular  with 
French  judges,  so  that  to-day  the  cream  of  the  criminality  of  France, 
as  well  as  of  her  other  colonies,  comes  to  end  its  days  in  French  Guiana. 

For  years  different  convict  camps  were  established  within  the  colony, 
and  changed  because  the  prisoners  died  of  fever  in  droves — which 
would  not  have  mattered  had  not  some  of  their  guardians  suffered  the 
same  fate.  In  1867  there  were  18,000  convicts,  with  an  average  of 
1200  arriving'-  every  year.     They  are  divided  at  present  among  four 


ROAMING  THE  THREE  GUIANAS  563 

penal  stations,  of  which  that  at  the  mouth  of  the  Maroni  River  and  tlie 
big  stone  penitentiary  on  a  sHght  plateau  at  the  edge  of  the  sea  in 
Cayenne  are,  the  most  important,  the  latter  housing  abou  330  regular 
prisoners  and  400  "transients"  at  the  time  of  my  visit.  Though  they 
come  from  all  the  other  French  colonies, — Algeria,  the  West  Indies, 
Madagascar,  and  the  rest — by  far  the  majority  of  the  convicts  one  sees 
in  Cayenne  are  white  men  from  France,  probably  a  large  percentage  of 
them  from  Paris,  many  of  them  truly  rough  looking  customers,  for  all 
their  whipped-dog  attitude.  A  few  are  educated  men  of  good  families 
who  have  gone  seriously  astray  and  been  caught  at  it.  The  man  who 
stole  millions  of  French  church  money  after  these  churches  were  de- 
clared state  property ;  another  once  high  up  in  the  government  who 
made  undue  use  of  that  position  to  feather  his  own  nest;  several 
lawyers  who  were  unusually  rapacious  in  robbing  their  clients;  half  a 
dozen  traitors  are  there — or  were,  for  one  must  not  assume  the  present 
tense  long  in  such  surroundings — all  dressed  in  exactly  the  same  buff- 
colored  blouse  and  trousers  of  coarsest  canvas-like  stuff,  the  former 
generally  open  to  the  navel,  and  a  crude  straw  hat  woven  of  the  azvara 
palm-leaf,  working  at  the  same  digging  of  sewers,  the  cutting  of  grass, 
or  the  breaking  of  stone  in  the  public  streets  as  the  thieving  degenerates 
from  Les  Ilalles  and  the  perverted  apaches  from  Montmartre.  Irre- 
spective of  their  origin  and  former  habits,  newcomers  begin  at  the 
hardest  manual  labor  under  the  blazing  tropical  sun,  which  soon  kills 
off  the  weak  and  establishes  a  new  sort  of  survival  of  the  fittest.  "The 
climate  itself  is  a  great  factor  in  bringing  repentance,"  as  a  jailer  puts 
it.  This,  the  arduous  toil,  and  the  diet — or  lack  of  it — give  those  who 
survive  a  greatly  changed  appearance,  and  it  is  only  by  looking  twice 
that  one  can  see  the  Parisian  apache  or  trickster  under  the  sallow, 
yellow  faces,  gaunt  with  fever,  of  the  wretches  whose  clothing  hangs 
about  them  as  from  a  clothes-pole. 

The  deportes  are  divided  into  three  classes, — transportes,  merely 
sentenced  to  a  certain  number  of  years  at  forced  labor ;  rclcgucs,  serving 
life  sentences ;  and  lihcrcs,  former  convicts  free  to  live  where  they  choose 
within  the  colony.  Highwaymen,  burglars,  and  murderers  make  up  a 
large  percentage  of  the  list;  yet  if  he  is  asked,  almost  any  one  of  them 
will  answer  "affaire  de  femme,"  though  he  may  be  the  most  miserable 
sneak  thief  or  a  man  who  "only  killed  his  mother."  There  are  no 
women  in  the  Cayenne  penitentiary,  for  they  are  sent  to  a  prison  in 
charge  of  the  Sisters  of  St.  Laurent  over  on  the  boundary  of  Dutch 
Guiana.    Professional  criminals  and  recidivists  are  particularly  assigned 


564  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

to  the  Cayenne  establishment;  though  there  are  men  with  sentences  of 
from  five  years  up  for  almost  every  conceivable  crime.  In  practice, 
any  man  sentenced  to  seven  years  or  more  is  virtually  a  life  prisoner. 
Even  if  his  sentence  is  less  than  that,  he  can  only  get  back  to  France  after 
serving  a  like  term  as  liberc  and  earning  his  own  passage  money  hon- 
estly— and  honest  money  does  not  float  about  French  Guiana.  When 
one  considers  how  stern  is  the  struggle  for  existence  in  crowded  French 
cities,  the  hardship  of  the  accused  being  obliged  to  prove  his  innocence 
under  French  law,  and  the  carelessness  or  indifference  of  French  judges 
in  handing  out  sentences  of  seven  years  or  more  for  almost  minor 
crimes,  it  is  not  strange  that,  though  the  world  has  never  heard  of  them, 
there  are  many  more  examples  of  the  devilish  injustice  of  man  to  man 
than  the  notorious  case  of  Dreyfus. 

Not  only  can  he  wear  only  the  two  coarse  garments  and  a  hat,  without 
shoes,  but  the  prisoner  is  denuded  even  of  the  Frenchman's  pride,  his 
mustache,  being  clean  shaven  and  shorn  to  accentuate  the  difference 
between  him  as  an  outcast  and  the  free  members  of  society.  Luckily, 
I  was  wearing  a  labial  decoration,  and  thus  was  looked  on  with  less 
scorn  and  suspicion  by  the  negro  population  than  might  otherwise  have 
been  the  case ;  for  the  standards  and  symbols  of  Cayenne  are  to  their 
primitive  minds  also  those  of  the  outside  world.  Educated  prisoners 
are  sometimes  made  use  of,  after  they  have  served  the  first  part  of 
their  time  at  hard  labor,  as  book-keepers  or  skilled  mechanics — a  bright- 
looking  relegue  was  installing  new  telephone  lines  with  convict  workmen 
during  my  visit — ^but  these  things  are  mainly  for  the  convenience  of 
the  administration  and  to  save  the  officers  in  charge  from  work,  never 
with  the  idea  of  helping  the  man  himself.  In  fact,  "the  regeneration  of 
the  man  sentenced  to  travaux  forces,  imagined  by  the  law  of  1854,  has 
become  a  legend  at  which  the  first  to  laugh  are  the  unregenerated 
themselves."  Somehow  I  had  pictured  to  myself  a  penal  colony  as  a 
place  where  the  unfortunate,  removed  from  their  former  troubles  and 
temptations,  were  turned  loose  in  a  new  and  virgin  land  and,  with  an 
occasional  helping  hand  from  above,  given  the  opportunity  to  begin  life 
anew.  Nothing  could  be  farther  from  the  fact  in  French  Guiana.  The 
officers  themselves  consider  it  a  punishment  to  be  sent  there,  and  their 
treatment  of  the  wretches  under  them  is  that  of  noxious  animals  which 
it  is  an  advantage  to  be  rid  of  as  soon  as  possible.  In  view  of  the 
many  splendid  qualities  of  the  French,  it  is  incredible  how  few  "bowels 
for  their  kindred"  these  officers  in  charge  have  for  their  prisoners, 
unbelievable  that  the   French   soldier,   who  has  known  some   of   the 


ROAMIXG  THE  THREE  GUIAXAS  565 

hardships  of  life  as  a  conscript,  can  treat  his  own  flesh  and  blood  in  a 
way  that  does  not  seem  human,  giving  the  onlooker  full  credence  in  the 
story  of  "Jean  Valjean,"  making  their  helpless  victims  feel  that  what 
society  seeks  is  not  reform,  but  revenge — revenge  for  forcing  the  par- 
ticular members  of  it  with  whom  they  come  in  contact  to  spend  months 
or  years  as  prison-guards  or  administrators  in  a  hot  and  fever-stricken 
land  far  from  their  beloved  France. 

I  am  not  a  particularly  firm  believer  in  the  efticacy  of  repentance, 
but  even  if  he  felt  the  desire  to  do  better  stirring  within  him,  the  convict 
of  Cayenne  would  find  every  conceivable  difficulty  on  the  road  to  reform. 
He  is  marked  and  stamped  with,  and  hounded  for,  his  past  sins,  without 
a  friend  on  earth,  except  in  the  rare  cases  when  he  has  money,  without 
which  he  is  made  to  understand  that  his  early  elimination  is  the  thing 
most  desirable.  The  great  majority,  of  course,  are  scoundrels  who 
deserve  their  fate — or  at  least  a  somewhat  more  humane  one.  But 
imagine  yourself  an  educated,  well-bred  man  who,  succumbing  to  over- 
whelming temptation  or  cruel  force  of  circumstances,  has  appropriated 
public  funds,  for  example,  and  been  suddenly  removed  from  Paris 
boulevards  to  dig  sewer-trenches  in  stony  soil  in  the  public  streets  of 
a  negro  city  beneath  a  tropical  sun,  working  in  bare  feet  on  the  scantiest 
of  prison  rations  under  a  bullying  negro  boss!  The  most  iniquitous 
part  of  the  whole  French  system  is  that  not  only  are  white  prisoners 
set  at  the  most  degrading  tasks  among  the  black  population,  but  that 
they  are  often  under  command  of  negroes — and  naturally,  the  effect 
of  this  on  the  primitive  African  mind  is  to  double  their  native  insolence 
and  convince  them  that  all  white  men  are  of  a  low  and  criminal  type. 
The  other  two  Guianas  would  never  dream  of  letting  the  negro  popula- 
tion see  white  men  doing  manual  labor,  even  though  they  were  sentenced 
to  it — much  less  put  them  under  negro  command ;  but  the  intangibility 
of  the  color-line  among  the  French  is  notorious. 

Forty  years  after  the  establishment  of  the  penal  colony,  the  prisoners 
were  allowed  to  be  rented  out  to  private  individuals.  Those  who  hire 
them  must  pay  the  prison  authorities  about  two  and  a  half  francs  a  day 
each,  defray  certain  hospital  insurance,  and  comply  with  several  irksome 
and  rather  stupid  rules.  The  red  tape  and  poor  dovetailing  between 
departments  is  especially  troublesome.  The  man  who  hires  a  prisoner 
pays  the  government  a  total  of  78  francs  a  month,  or  considerably  more 
than  the  wages  of  free  labor — when  this  can  be  had.  A  foreigner  long 
resident  in  the  colony  had  found  that  only  by  giving  the  convicts  wine 
with  their  meals,  tobacco  at  night,  if  they  bad  worked  well  during  the 


566  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

day.  and  other  gratuities,  could  he  get  any  real  work  out  of  them,  so 
that  in  the  end  the  prisoner  cost  twice  as  much  as  free  labor  and  was 
a  much  poorer  workman;  while  if  the  convict  falls  ill,  a  mishap  at 
which  he  is  an  expert,  the  cost  becomes  "fantastic."  Most  of  the 
prisoners,  therefore,  still  toil  directly  for  the  government  on  public 
Works,  and,  the  negro  freeman  scorning  labor,  private  persons  whcT 
require  v\-orkmen  usually  hire  Uhercs,  whom  it  is  not  necessary  either  to 
treat  or  pay  well. 

Though  he  cannot  leave  the  colony,  the  lihere  can  go  where  he  chooses 
within  it,  and  dress  like  a  civilian — if  he  can  afford  it.  When  his  sen- 
tence is  up  he  is  given  a  suit  of  blue  jeans,  a  slouch  felt  hat,  clumsy 
shoes,  and  is  left  to  shift  for  himself,  though  often  obliged  to  report 
to  the  authorities  at  frequent  intervals.  Almost  always  he  has  an  avoid- 
your-e3'es  manner  which  discloses  his  past,  even  if  his  five  years  or 
more  as  prisoner  has  not  made  his  face  familiar  to  all  the  colony.  Here 
and  there  in  a  stroll  through  the  town  one  is  startled — at  least  after 
three  years  of  disconnection  between  manual  labor  and  the  European 
race — to  find  white  men  working  as  shoemakers,  butchers,  small  me- 
chanics, or  anything  else  at  which  they  can  rake  and  scrape  a  livelihood. 
These  are  invariably  Uteres,  some  of  whom  have  formed  alliances  with 
such  females  as  the  colony  affords  and  bred  more  of  their  kind  with 
negro  trimmings.  As  there  are  no  white  women  available  for  this 
class,  and  the  lihere  has  been  a  familiar  sight  in  French  Guiana  for  the 
past  sixty  years,  imquestionably  many  of  the  mulattoes  and  quadroons 
one  sees  strutting  about  town,  holding  political  places  of  importance 
and  looking  with  deepest  scorn  upon  the  white  convicts,  are  the  sons 
and  daughters  of  released  criminals.  Having  in  most  cases  lost  all 
sense  of  shame  or  decency  during  their  bestial  imprisonment,  Uhercs 
not  only  work  at  odd  jobs  about  the  market  and  the  town,  but  through- 
out the  colony,  the  sight  of  their  groveling  and  lowly  estate  naturally 
not  decreasing  the  negro's  conviction  of  his  own  superiority  over  the 
\'.-hite  race.  Coming  from  prison  life  after  a  background  of  artificial 
civilization,  most  of  them  cannot  cope  with  existence  in  such  surround- 
ings and  often  commit  new  crimes  for  no  other  purpose  than  to  get 
back  into  prison  and  at  least  have  something  to  eat  again. 

Though  there  has  been  an  average  of  1200  convict  arrivals  a  year 
since  1854,  and  almost  none  have  returned  home,  the  number  in  the 
colony  remains  almost  stationar)--,  at  the  remarkably  low  figure  of  from 
six  to  eight  thousand.  Of  the  surplus,  perhaps  four  per  cent,  have 
escaped ;  many  have  been  shot  by  guards  or  been  killed  in  prison  feuds. 


ROAMING  THE  THREE  GUIANAS        5^7 

while  great  numbers  have  died  of  tropical  diseases,  rough  treatment,  and 
virtual  starvation.  Many  have  run  away  into  the  bush  or  the  dense 
jungles  on  the  Brazilian  or  the  Dutch  side  of  the  colony;  but  being 
mainly  city  men  and  generally  of  slight  education  or  intelligence,  they 
have  absolutely  no  adaptability  in  the  bush,  not  even  knowing  enough 
to  take  directions  by  the  sun ;  and  while  a  man  used  to  wilderness  travel 
might  get  away,  most  of  the  refugees  have  found  the  jungle  impossible 
and  have  returned  to  serve  life  sentences.  The  bones  of  others  are  not 
infrequently  found  up  in  the  interior.  The  few  who  reach  civilization 
in  Brazil  are  the  most  fortunate.  Those  who  get  into  Dutch  Guiana 
are,  in  theory,  subject  to  extradition,  but  are  commonly  overlooked, 
unless  they  make  themselves  conspicuous  by  becoming  penniless  or 
returning  to  their  old  ways.  A  few  have  become  men  of  importance 
in  the  neighboring  colony,  particularly  a  well-dressed  rascal  who  has 
lived  some  twenty  years  now  as  a  merchant  in  Paramaribo.  Rafts  of 
moco-moco  stems,  and  a  canoe  made  from  a  sheet,  are  among  the 
curiosities  left  by  escaped  prisoners  to  the  Cayenne  museum.  On  the 
Dutch  side  of  the  Maroni  River  they  are  free  from  French  pursuit,  but 
have  still  greater  trials  with  the  Indians,  and  particularly  with  the  wild 
negroes,  who  shoot  them  freely,  or  more  often,  make  them  slaves  and 
work  them  until  they  are  all  but  dead,  then  bring  them  back  to  the 
French  and  claim  the  standing  reward. 

It  is  against  the  law,  or  at  least  almost  impossible,  to  visit  the  "camp," 
as  the  big  prison  in  the  town  of  Cayenne  is  called,  particularly  since 
some  American  got  the  former  commander  "in  wrong"  with  the  French 
Government  by  publishing  an  account  of  such  a  visit.  But  neither  laws 
nor  strict  rules  survive  personal  friendship  in  Latin  countries,  and  I 
had  made  good  use  of  my  short  acquaintance  with  the  four  Frenchmen 
who  had  landed  with  me.  At  that,  they  politely  hedged  when  I  hinted 
a  desire  to  get  inside  the  prison,  until  one  morning,  catching  alone  one 
of  them  who  had  just  been  transferred  from  New  Caledonia  as  a  guard, 
I  mellowed  him  with  strong  iced  drinks  under  the  earth-floored  veranda 
of  Cayenne's  least  disreputable  cafe.  So  wheedlingly  did  he  introduce 
me  to  the  stern  "principal"  of  the  prison,  a  French  captain,  that  the 
cut  and  dried  refusal  shriveled  on  his  lips  and,  taking  down  a  large 
bunch  of  big  keys,  he  led  us  into  the  prison  in  person. 

It  is  under  strict  miUtary  regime,  the  building  that  forms  a  part  of 
the  wall  of  the  immense  yard  being  the  barracks  of  soldier  guards. 
Here  they  had  good  spring  beds  and  paid  the  nominal  sum  of  one  franc 
twenty-five  centimes  a  day,  with  an  additional  two   francs  for  their 


568  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

wives,  in  the  rare  cases  in  which  they  had  brought  them  out  from 
France.  There  were  separate  rooms  for  one  or  two  famiHes,  and  a 
good  kitchen  well  served  by  convicts,  with  wine  and  champagne  for 
those  who  could  afford  it.  Across  the  bare  yard  were  many  massive 
gates  with  prisoner  turnkeys,  for  discipline  is  maintained  largely  by 
making  trusties  and  "stool-pigeons"  and  setting  them  as  spies  over  the 
rest.  There  was  an  infinncric  where  the  merely  sick  are  shut  up  in 
pens,  a  sad  looking  place  with  much  fever  and  crude,  careless  surgery 
without  anesthetics,  from  which  those  who  can  convince  the  hard- 
hearted officials  that  they  are  really  ill  are  sent  to  the  hospital.  The 
"principal"  was  full  of  courtesies  for  me,  but  he  took  it  out  on  the 
prisoners,  always  addressing  them  as  one  might  a  particularly  low  class 
of  animal.  Indeed,  officials  high  and  low  were  incredibly  prejudiced 
against  the  convicts ;  not  one  of  them  seemed  to  be  large  enough  to 
recognize  them  as  partly  the  victims  of  society  or  of  circumstances. 
The  officers  have  a  secret  identification  system,  and  the  prisoners  a 
secret  argot,  or  slang,  which  keep  guards  and  guarded  still  farther 
apart.  There  are  special  and  incredible  punishments  for  the  slightest  of- 
fenses, such  as  failing  to  grovel  before  the  meanest  underling  among  the 
soldier  guards,  which  increases  the  number  of  invalids.  Even  in  the  in- 
firmary there  was  not  a  book  to  be  had,  nothing  whatever  to  take  the 
minds  of  inmates  off  their  present  deplorable  surroundings,  not  even  a 
sign  of  a  priest.  I  have  never  seen  a  human  institution  over  the  door  of 
which  Dante's  famous  phrase  would  be  more  entirely  appropriate.  The 
bitter  cynicism  of  the  monument  of  Schoelcher  freeing  a  black  slave  in 
the  main  square  of  Cayenne  is  sure  to  strike  one  after  a  visit  to  the 
prison. 

The  bulk  of  the  prison  is  made  up  of  big  dungeons  with  a  few  small 
barred  windows  high  above  the  unleveled  earth  floor,  in  which  are 
confined  the  regular  prisoners  divided  by  "classes," — Arabs  here,  men 
from  Madagascar  there,  white  Frenchmen  in  others.  This  division  is 
no  concession  to  the  color-line,  but  is  merely  for  the  purpose  of  simplify- 
ing the  administration.  Three  feet  above  the  ground  were  four  parallel 
poles,  and  fastened  to  these  were  strips  of  stiff  canvas  two  feet  wide 
and  a  little  more  than  five  long,  all  so  close  together  that  even  a  thin 
man  could  barely  squeeze  between  them,  forming  two  rows  of  sleeping 
quarters  the  length  of  each  dungeon.  Evidently  nothing  else  was 
allowed,  for  one  fellow  with  a  fever  being  covered  with  a  dirty  old  rag 
the  "principal"  demanded  of  the  trembling  trusty  in  charge,  in  a  voice 
such  as  one  might  use  to  a  street  cur,  at  the  same  time  snatching  the 


ROAMING  THE  THREE  GUIANAS  569 

cover  off  the  invalid,  "Where  did  he  get  that?"  The  trusty  shakingly 
replied  that  it  was  an  old  flour  sack,  which  he  was  forthwith  ordered  to 
lurn  over  lo  the  guard  outside.  "Do  you  dare  not  rise  and  take  off 
your  hat  when  you  see  nic  pass?"  bellowed  the  commander  to  another 
emaciated  wretch  who  with  the  greatest  difficulty  could  crawl  to  his 
feet  and  force  his  legs  to  hold  him,  though  he  hastened  to  do  both. 
Even  this  was  not  enough  for  my  wine-cheered  friend  from  the  boat, 
who  proceeded  to  shout  more  insults  at  the  fellow  for  his  "insubordina- 
tion." 

In  another  room  were  a  few  trinkets,  odds  and  ends,  and  covers  of 
various  origins  for  some  of  the  canvas-strip  beds.  The  "principal"  ex- 
plained that  this  was  the  room  of  trusties  and  turnkeys,  several  of  whom 
were  then  standing  at  attention  before  him.  Then,  still  pretending  to 
give  me  information,  but  raising  his  voice  to  a  bellow,  he  screamed,  "Yes, 
these  we  allow  a  few  extra  privileges,  and  they  are  even  greater  pigs 
than  the  others — Oi<i,  Us  sont  Ics  plus  cochons  de  tons!"  There  was 
not  much  visible  sign  of  an  opportunity  to  be  anything  else.  I  not  only 
saw  no  bath  anywhere  within  the  "camp,"  but  no  place  where  a  prisoner 
could  so  much  as  wash  his  hands.  Nothing  but  absolute  brute  necessities 
w^ere  recognized,  and  even  then  everything  was  of  the  crudest  and 
coarsest. 

"And  do  you  treat  educated  men  and  those  who  have  formerly  lived 
in  clean  surroundings  the  same  as  you  do  the  recidivists  and  the 
apaches?"  I  asked. 

"Bah!"  cried  the  captain,  with  his  nastiest  sneer,  though  maintaining 
his  attitude  of  overdrawn  courtesy  toward  me.  "After  a  few  days  they 
become  just  like  the  others  and  you  never  see  tlie  slightest  difference." 

Come  to  think  it  over,  I  suppose  they  would. 

The  prisoners  get  up  at  live  o'clock,  have  coffee,  and  go  to  work  at 
6:30.  A  "breakfast"  of  thin  soup,  one  vegetable,  half  a  kilo  of  bread 
dc  dcuxiemc  qualitc,  and  what  is  supposed  to  be  250  grams  of  meat 
before  it  is  cooked,  but  which  boils  down  to  about  half  that,  is  served 
at  10:30.  Three  hours  later  the  famished  convicts  are  marched  out 
into  the  blazing  sunshine  again  to  complete  their  eight  hours  of  daily 
toil.  At  night  they  get  a  slab  of  bread  and  a  kind  of  vegetable  hash, 
duly  weighed  on  dirty  scales.  It  is  impossible  that  any  grown  man 
doing  manual  labor  should  not  be  habitually  ravenous  on  such  a  diet. 
Not  only  was  the  stuff  of  the  coarsest  grade  imaginable,  and  unsavory 
as  food  carelessly  cooked  in  great  bulk  always  is,  but  it  was  handled  by 
guards,  visitors,  and  any  other  chance  passer-by  exactly  as  one  might 


0/* 


WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 


handle  the  food  of  a  dog,  perhaps  dropped  underfoot  and  then  tossed 
back  into  the  pan,  from  which  it  may  be  doled  out  to  a  man  who  a 
vear  or  two  before  ate  in  the  best  restaurants  of  Paris. 

An  old  chapel,  now  full  of  cells,  was  a  place  of  punishment  for  minor 
infractions  of  the  rules,  the  inmates  of  which  slept  on  boards  and  were 
given  bread  and  water  two  days  out  of  three.  In  another  building  were 
the  cachots,  or  dungeons  proper,  stone  rooms  about  four  by  six  feet  in 
size,  with  very  low  ceilings,  solid  doors,  and  only  a  hole  some  ten  inches 
in  diameter  for  ventilation.  Here  recaptured  men  awaiting  trial  were 
kept  in  solitary  confinement,  with  a  plank  for  bed,  worn  concave  during- 
many  years  of  occupation,  a  block  of  wood  as  pillow,  and  bread  and 
water  one  day  out  of  three.  For  those  who  aroused  still  greater  wrath 
among  their  guards  there  were  cells  in  which  a  man  could  neither  stand 
up  nor  lie  down,  and  other  underground  horrors  worthy  of  the  Inqui- 
sition. I  am  not  one  of  those  who  believe  in  making  prison  life  a 
perpetual  ball-game;  but  there  are  limits  to  the  brutality  which  man 
should  permit  himself  toward  his  fellow-man.  After  all,  it  did  not 
look  as  if  Hugo's  famous  novel  had  done  much  to  mitigate  the  lot  of 
French  prisoners.  Things  may  have  been  alleviated  in  France  itself,, 
but  in  this  tropical  Hades  there  has  certainly  been  no  improvement  over 
the  bagnes  of  Toulon  of  a  century  ago. 

"Look  at  that  dog!"  cried  the  commander,  as  the  occupant  of  one 
of  these  ovens  rose  to  his  feet  when  we  entered.  Then,  with  all  the 
sarcasm  he  could  throw  into  his  voice,  "Vous  etes  content,  hein?" 
The  officials  all  seemed  to  try  to  impress  me  with  the  fact  that  they 
had  a  particularly  dangerous  and  incorrigible  lot  of  wild  animals  in 
their  charge,  and  looked  for  applause  at  their  ability  to  keep  them  under 
control  by  such  methods  as  savage  brutality  and  by  taking  every 
advantage  of  the  helpless  wretches  to  taunt  them.  Yet  no  owner 
of  wild  animals  would  have  dreamed  of  keeping  them  in  such  airless, 
crowded  and  starved  conditions.  There  was  a  den  of  relegues,  for 
instance,  ex-convicts  who  had  violated  their  parole  as  liheres  and  were 
awaiting  trial — nearly  all  white  Frenchmen  and  as  fine  a  collection 
of  hopeless,  helpless,  careless,  don't-give-a-damn  toughs  as  it  has 
ever  been  my  privilege  to  see.  The  atmosphere  was  exactly  that  of 
a  den  of  savage  beasts  who  considered  all  the  outside  world  their 
implacable  enemies  and  were  ready  to  rend  and  tear  anyone  who  was 
so  careless  as  to  come  within  reach  without  a  weapon  with  which 
to  cow  them.  There  were  between  thirty  and  forty  in  each  of  the 
12  by  1 6- foot  rooms,  and  by  no  means  space  on  the  two  wooden  plat- 


The  human  scavenger:  _;  < 


M 


'^  > 


III  the  marketplace  of  Cayenne.     The  chief  stock  is  cassava  bread  wrapped  in  banana  leaves 


m%4^ 


French  officers  m  charge  of  the  prisoners  of  Cayenne 


White  French  convicts  who  nould 


il-i    t     ,      1 


conscripts  who  would  rather  stay  at  home 


"    <     r      n  y  .  ul  tu  our  ship  black  French 


ROAMING  THE  THREE  GUI  AN  AS  571 

forms,  resembling  those  in  the  aisles  de  nuif  of  French  cities,  for  all  to 
lie  down  at  once. 

To  add  to  the  joy  of  their  lot,  the  prisoners  are  constantly  robbed 
of  their  legal  rations  to  fill  the  pockets  of  the  officials  and  guards. 
There  is  a  saying  that  officers  arrive  in  Cayenne  with  half  a  trunk 
and  leave  with  six.  In  theory,  the  men  are  entitled  to  wine,  tobacco, 
and  reading  matter;  practically,  they  never  see  any  of  those  things 
unless  they  manage  to  get  them  from  outside.  At  Albina,  across 
from  the  chief  penal  station  on  the  Dutch  boundary,  wine  is  always 
for  sale  at  a  song.  The  Indians  or  "boschs"  who  bring  in  an  escaped 
prisoner  get  two  of  the  five  dollars  paid  by  the  French  Government, 
the  prison  officials  pocketing  the  rest.  There  is  always  an  advantage 
in  killing  off  prisoners,  for  their  names  are  still  kept  on  the  books 
and  the  ofhcials  still  draw  their  ration  money,  as  they  do  that  of 
uncaptured  fugitives.  It  has  often  been  proved  quite  possible  for  a 
guard  at  least  passively  to  bring  about  a  prisoner's  death,  merely  for 
the  few  cents  a  day  he  can  pocket  for  his  rations.  Naturally  there 
is  much  underground  favoritism,  and  the  prisoner  with  money  or 
powerful  friends  outside  can  usually  get  away.  The  guard  is  not 
only  amenable  to  a  bribe,  but  glad  to  have  another  dead  man  on  his 
ration  books.  Such  escapes  are  generally  engineered  from  over  the 
Dutch  border.  An  expert  American  cracksman,  well  known  to  our 
police,  "did  a  job"  in  Paris  a  few  years  ago  and  was  sent  to  Cayenne; 
few  who  have  been  there  will  blame  the  perfectly  respectable  Amer- 
icans of  Paramaribo  for  helping  him  to  escape.  The  German  who 
attempted  to  get  Morocco  to  revolt  against  French  rule  escaped  while 
I  was  in  the  Guianas,  and  there  were  very  persistent  rumors  to  the 
effect  that  the  German  Moravian  missionaries  in  Dutch  Guiana  knew 
quite  well  how  it  happened. 

The  prisoners  themselves  sometimes  help  their  oppressors  in  the 
matter  of  ration  money,  for  they  have  secret  societies  of  bloodthirsty 
tendencies  and  private  enmities  are  often  settled  while  the  prison 
camp  lies  in  restless  slumber.  Sometimes  it  is  merely  a  quick  stab 
upward  in  the  darkness  through  a  stretched-canvas  bed ;  sometimes 
a  ring  is  formed  by  the  other  prisoners,  and  the  two  opponents,  each 
armed  with  a  knife  and  attended  by  a  second  who  has  no  other  right 
than  to  give  his  man  another  knife  if  his  own  is  knocked  from  his 
hand,  go  at  it,  with  no  quarter  asked  or  given.  The  guards  will  not 
risk  their  lives — and  their  probable  ''rake-off" — by  entering  and 
attempting  to  stop  the  fight  in  the  dark,  and  when  one  combatant  is 


572  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

killed  he  is  left  to  lie  where  he  has  fallen  until  morning,  when  everyone 
in  the  room  assures  the  investigating  official  that  he  slept  soundly  all 
night  long.  Death  naturally  has  few  terrors  for  these  convicts,  and  it  is 
impossible  to  punish  them  more  than  they  are  already  being  punished ; 
hence  there  is  no  motive  to  restrain  themselves.  In  short,  Cayenne 
definitely  proves  the  existence  of  a  hell,  though  its  geographical 
location  does  not  exactly  tally  with  the  notions  of  old-fashioned 
theologians. 

It  took  all  day  to  get  back  on  board  the  ^liitilles,  silhouetted  far 
out  on  the  horizon  beside  the  lighthouse  of  "Lost  Child"  Rock.  For, 
with  typical  Latin  disorder,  the  sailing  was  postponed  as  often  as  it 
was  announced.  At  the  customhouse  outgoing  baggage  was  exam- 
ined by  slovenly  but  pompous  negroes  as  thoroughly  as  if  it  were 
being  landed,  mainly  because  it  is  illegal  to  take  gold  out  of  the 
colony.  A  rowboat  carried  us  out  to  a  small  steamer  which  could 
not  touch  shore.  Another  brought  out  that  month's  contingent  of 
conscripts,  in  blue- jean  uniforms  and  the  familiar  French  army  cap, 
their  shining  new  cups,  canteens,  and  the  like  hanging  about  them. 
With  few  exceptions  they  were  negro  youths,  pale  under  their  jet- 
black  skins ;  and  it  was  difficult  to  decide  which  looked  the  sadder — 
the  white  prisoner  boatmen  from  France  who  had  to  stay  behind, 
or  the  black  "freemen"  soldiers  of  Cayenne  who  had  to  go.  Among 
them  was  a  French  priest  already  gray  and  heavily  bearded,  still  in 
full  priestly  garb,  but  with  a  soldier's  kit  and  cap  hanging  over  one 
shoulder.  All  the  afternoon  the  Gallic  chaos  reigned,  until  at  last 
we  neared  the  Antilles  and  were  transferred  to  her  again  in  rowboats, 
the  soldiers  descending  into  the  third  class  and  the  canvas-clad  con- 
victs, who  liad  come  on  board  carrying  the  bags  and  bundles  of  negro 
passengers  and  the  officers,  meekly  descending  the  gangway  again, 
their  manhood  evidently  so  completely  shattered  that  they  dared  not 
even  attempt  to  stow  themslves  away.  We  were  off  about  six ;  and 
as  I  looked  back  upon  the  dim,  flat  land  dying  away  in  the  sunset, 
there  came  to  mind  an  old  slab  of  wood  that  had  been  removed  from 
a  prisoner's  grave  to  the  museum  of  Cayenne,  on  which  one  can  still 
make  out  the  epitaph,  crudely  carved  by  some  fellow-convict: 

Qu'  avons  nous  besoin  de  savoir  ton  nom? 
N'etais-tu  pas  comme  nous  un  compagnon  d'exil? 
Dors  en  paix,  maintenant  que  tes  cendres  reposent, 
Nouveaux  exiles,  nous  vous  souvenons 
Et  t'offrons  nos  regrets. 
A  bientot. 


ROAMING  THE  THREE  GUIANAS  573 

Next  afternoon  the  ocean  gradually  turned  yellowish  again,  and  we 
slowed  down  near  a  lightship  marked  Suriname  Rivier  to  take  on 
a  pilot  who  looked  like  a  tar-brushed  German.  To  my  surprise,  we 
steamed  for  two  hours  up  a  broad  river  before  we  sighted  a  mainly 
three-story  wooden-clapboarded  town  of  Rotterdamish  aspect  along 
a  slightly  curved  shore,  a  town  far  prettier  at  first  view  than  either 
Georgetown  or  Cayenne.  The  AutUlcs  manoeuvered  her  way  up  to 
a  wharf,  and  we  were  free  to  land  in  Paramaribo,  capital  of  Surinam, 
better  known  to  the  outside  world  as  Dutch  Guiana.  The  black 
French  conscripts  were  not  allowed  ashore,  even  their  own  officers 
admitting  that  they  would  run  away  at  the  first  opportunity.  The 
streets  were  wide  and,  in  contrast  to  the  paved  ones  of  the  other  two 
Guianas,  covered  with  hard-packed,  almost  white  sand.  Everything 
was  of  wood,  except  a  few  old  mansions  and  government  buildings 
of  imported  brick,  said  to  have  been  sent  out  as  ballast  in  the  old 
slave  days  when  the  colony  shipped  much  produce  to  Holland.  It 
was  a  noiseless  and  almost  spotless  town — at  least,  until  one  began 
to  look  more  closely — with  steep  gables,  pot-grown  flowers  peering 
over  clapboarded  verandas,  and  negrodom  improved  and  held  in  check 
by  the  staid  and  plodding  Hollander.  Particularly  did  it  present  a 
beguiling  sight  in  the  quiet  of  evening,  under  its  soft  gas-lights. 

Coming  from  Cayenne,  one  was  struck  especially  by  the  outward 
cleanliness  of  everything.  Garments  might  not  always  be  whole,  but 
even  those  of  the  poorest  people  loked  stiff  and  prim,  as  if  they  had 
that  moment  come  from  the  laundry.  The  negro  and  part-negro 
women,  though  less  noisy  in  their  tastes  than  those  under  French 
influence,  still  wore  gaily  figured  kerchiefs  about  their  heads,  tied 
boat-shaped,  with  the  two  ends  at  the  sides  of  the  head.  Like  them 
the  calico  gown,  which  was  evidently  a  six-  or  seven-foot  skirt 
fastened  about  the  neck  and  hitched  up  in  great  folds  and  bunches 
at  the  waist,  were  newly  laundered,  giving  the  wearers  the  appearance 
of  gaily  decorated  and  freshly  starched  grainsacks.  The  mixture  of 
the  negro  and  the  staid  Dutch  burgher  has  produced  quite  a  dift'erent 
result  from  that  ^with  the  temperamental  Freujchman,  Here  'the 
populace  was  calm,  grave,  noticeably  more  orderly  both  in  its  move- 
ments and  its  mental  processes  than  in  the  other  tw-o  Guianas,  with 
much  of  the  natural  African  animality  apparently  suppressed.  Some 
of  the  Dutch-negro  young  women  were  magnificent  physical  specimens, 
and,  if  one  could  overlook  their  color,  distinctly  attractive  in  their  im- 
maculate,   well-ironed    gay    gowns    and   turbans.     In    the    streets    of 


574  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Paramaribo  was  the  greatest  conglomeration  of  races  I  had  seen  in 
all  South  America.  Soldiers,  from  the  blackest  to  the  blondest  of 
Hollanders,  all  youthful  and  neatly  dressed  in  dark-blue  uniforms 
with  yellow  stripes,  hobnobbed  together ;  there  were  hordes  of 
Javanese  from  Holland's  overpopulated  East  Indies,  still  in  their 
native  dress  and  looking  like  a  cross  between  Hindus  and  Japanese  ; 
bejeweled  women  and  lithe,  half-naked  men  from  the  British  East 
Indies ;  and  so  many  Chinese  of  both  sexes  that  there  was  a  "Tong" 
or  Chinese  temple  in  one  of  the  ordinary  white  clapboarded  buildings, 
made  gay  by  red  perpendicular  Chinese  tablets  at  the  door.  These 
and  many  more  were  there,  and  crosses  between  all  of  them,  except 
between  the  Hindus  and  the  Javanese.  Of  them  all,  only  the  Hindus, 
male  and  female,  wore  unclean  garm.ents.  Children  were  noticeably 
numerous,  and  looked  as  neat  and  orderly  as  did  the  large,  airy  school- 
houses  they  attended.  Men  wore  starched  white  suits  with  a  uniform- 
like collar  buttoning  close  under  the  chin,  requiring  nothing  beneath 
them  but  a  thin  undershirt,  a  cheap  and  convenient  custom  in  vogue 
in  all  Dutch  tropical  colonies.  Among  the  throng  one  frequently  saw 
pallid,  yet  comely,  Jewish  women,  for  the  Jews  are  so  numerous  in 
Paramaribo  that  they  hold  synagogue  services  both  in  the  old  Portu- 
guese and  in  the  modern  Dutch  fashion.  They  intermarry  chiefly 
among  themselves,  and  are  among  the  most  wealthy  members  of 
the  colony.  In  Surinam  society  the  Jews  are  rated  next  below  the 
white  Dutch,  followed  by  the  Chinese,  and  so  on  down  the  scale  to 
the  Javanese  and  Hindu  coolies.  Of  the  many  mixtures,  the  "lip-lap," 
or  Dutch-Javanese,  is  the  least  promising,  while  the  Chinese-negro, 
especially  with  a  slight  dash  of  white  or  Hindu,  is  rated  the  most  lively, 
quick-witted,  and,  especially  in  the  case  of  the  women,  the  most 
ardently  sensual. 

The  first  traders  with  the  Indians  in  this  region  were  Dutch 
mariners,  chiefly  seeking  tobacco,  to  which  the  Hollanders  had  taken 
a  great  liking  and  which  they  could  not  otherwise  obtain  after  their 
revolt  from  Spain.  During  a  history  as  chaotic  and  checkered  as 
that  of  all  the  Guianas,  Surinam  was  once  held  by  the  British,  under 
the  name  of  Willoughby  Land,  and  in  the  ensuing  negotiations  it  was 
virtually  exchanged  for  a  worthless  little  rocky  island  up  on  the 
coast  of  North  America,  called  Manhattan.  It  is  said  that  the 
British  regret  the  trade — since  for  some  reason  the  island  and  its 
village  of  New  Amsterdam  slipped  through  their  fingers.  Surinam's 
greatest    problem   has    always    been   to   get    manual    laborers.     Her 


ROAMING  THE  THREE  GUIANAS  575 

African  slaves  revolted,  her  Chinese  coolies  committed  suicide  or 
went  into  trade,  the  Hindus  proved  on  the  whole  more  troublesome 
than  useful,  and  some  twenty  years  ago  she  began  importing  shij)loads 
(if  workers  from  the  crowded  Dutch  Island  of  Java— but  still  the 
])r.)l)lcm  is  not  satisfactorily  solved.  Commercially,  the  colony  is 
largely  in  German  hands,  pcuticularly  of  the  Moravians,  whose  first 
missionary  found  it  necessary  to  enter  business  in  order  to  keep  uj) 
his  mission.  Now,  a  century  later,  the  firm  which  bears  his  name 
is  the  most  powerful  in  Dutch  Guiana.  The  Moravians  confme  their 
work  to  negroes,  of  whom  they  educate  thousands  in  free  schools 
and  orphan  asylums.  There  are  several  other  missions ;  in  fact,  the 
colony  is  a  friendly  battle-ground  between  several  religious  sects,  with 
Lutheran  schools  for  the  higher  class,  Catholic  schools  for  little 
Hindus  and  Javanese,  and,  saddest  of  all,  a  great  leper  hospital  on 
the  edge  of  town  with  scores  of  little  houses,  a  church,  a  priest  who 
comes  to  hold  service  daily,  and  European  nun  nurses  who  now  and 
then  succumb  to  the  dread  disease  toward  which  the  natives  are,  on 
the  whole,  happy  fatalists. 

On  the  evening  of  my  arri\al  I  wandered  into  the  Dutch  Reformed 
Church  in  the  sanded  central  square.  It  was  crowded,  though  large, 
and  the  worshippers  had  an  earnest  appearance  which  for  the  moment 
gave  me  the  impression  that  here,  at  last,  was  a  South  American 
country  where  the  church  is  a  real  force  in  the  community.  Later  I 
found  that  the  crowd  had  come  to  greet  a  popular  minister,  just 
returned  from  several  months  in  Holland,  and  who,  it  w^as  hoped, 
would  be  moved  to  include  in  his  sermon  the  latest  news  from  the 
front.  As  to  the  earnest  manner,  it  w^as  merely  the  habitual  one  of 
the  staid  population,  and  those  who  should  know  claim  that  the 
church  is  really  a  slight  force  in  the  life  of  Dutch  Guiana.  The 
audience  was  divided  not  by  color,  but  by  sex,  the  women  separated 
from  the  men  by  the  main  aisle,  the  congregation  facing  the  minister 
from  three  directions.  Directly  before  him  across  the  church  were 
a  regal  few,  headed  by  the  governor  of  the  colony  and  other  important 
and  perspiring  Hollanders  in  heavy  black  and  formal  dress.  The 
majority  of  the  men  of  the  colony,  however,  were  dressed  in  white, 
or  at  least  very  light,  garments,  and  not  one  dark  dress  was  to  be 
seen  in  all  the  sea  of  white  spreading  forth  from  the  seat  I  had  found 
in  the  gallery.  There  seemed  to  be  no  poor  people  in  the  congre- 
gation^— a  noticeable  fact  against  the  background  of  Latin-American 
clmrches  habitually  oozing  paupers  and  loathsome  beggars.     Perhaps 


576  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

this  was  due  to  the  fact  that  the  blacker  and  more  ignorant  part 
of  the  population  went  to  the  big  wooden,  Gothic  cathedral  nearby, 
or  to  the  Moravian  churches.  All  the  women  wore  hats,  the  part- 
negro  girls  in  their  starched  bandanas  evidently  not  being  admitted. 
Though  there  were  many  of  some  negro  blood  and  apparently  no 
hint  of  a  color-line,  there  was  not  a  single  really  black  woman  and 
very  few  half-black  ones,  though  the  men,  on  the  other  hand,  were 
often  ebony  Africans  such  as  might  have  emerged  that  day  from 
the  heart  of  the  Dark  Continent,  rubbing  elbows  with  equally  haughty 
blond  Hollanders.  The  cause  of  this  disparity  of  color  in  the  two 
sexes  seemed  to  be  that  the  negro  men  of  means  pick  out  as  light 
wives  as  possible,  leaving  the  black  girls  to  their  poorer  brethren. 
The  form  of  service  was  familiarly  Protestant,  even  to  the  pre-reading 
of  the  hymns,  which  were  played  by  a  jet-black  organist  and  sung 
by  the  standing  audience.  During  prayers,  on  the  other  hand,  only 
the  men  rose — whether  because  the  women  did  not  need  them  or 
were  beyond  hope  was  not  apparent.  The  Predikant,  with  a  blond 
pompadour  and  the  Judgment  Day  air  and  voice  of  some  Protestant 
ministers,  preached  not  one,  but  four  sermons — four,  count  them ! — 
broken  by  hymns,  during  which  tar-brushed  ushers  in  black  Prince 
Alberts  took  up  as  many  collections.  An  old  white-haired  mulatto, 
similarly  garbed,  had  as  his  task  to  reprimand  boys  who  made  the 
slightest  disturbance.  Indeed,  there  were  many  hints  of  old-time 
Puritanism,  even  to  evidences  of  smug  hypocrisy. 

The  Reformed  and  the  Lutheran  churches  of  Paramaribo  alternate 
in  their  Sunday  night  services,  in  order  that  competition  shall  not  cut 
down  still  lower  their  congregations.  From  the  church  the  crowd 
went,  almost  intact,  to  the  "Kino,"  as  the  "movies"  are  called  in 
Surinam.  The  paternal  government  burdens  these— there  are  three, 
all  owned  by  Jews — with  many  stern  rules.  The  films  must  be  run 
by  hand,  not  by  motor ;  since  the  hard  times  incident  to  the  World 
War  only  two  performances  a  week  were  allowed ;  the  show  must 
be  over  by  10:30;  and  so  on,  until  one  became  amply  convinced  that 
it  was  no  happy-go-lucky  Latin  government  that  ruled  over  these 
sedate  African  Dutchmen.  But  there  are  limits  to  suppression.  To 
me,  fresh  from  Brazil  and  the  blase,  drawing-room  silence  which 
prevails  in  its  cinemas,  the  most  striking  part  of  this  performance 
was  the  almost  constant  howling  and  screaming  of  the  largely  negro 
audience,  now  cheering  on  the  doll- faced  hero,  now  shrieking  threats 
at  the  top-hatted  villain. 


ROAMING  THE  THREE  GUIANAS  577 

Down  at  the  market-place  along  the  water  front  there  was  an 
incredible  mixture  of  races,  tongues,  and  customs  each  morning. 
Dirty,  almost-naked  Hindu  beggars  slunk  in  and  out  among  buyers 
and  sellers;  Javanese  paused  to  scpiandcr  the  single  copper  left  from 
their  gambling,  and  plodded  noiselessly  on  in  their  bare  feet,  munch- 
ing the  mouthful  it  yielded ;  Chinese  women,  still  in  the  cotton 
trousers  of  their  homeland,  but  already  wearing  the  gay  starched 
bandana  of  their  adopted  country,  bargained  with  a  squatting 
Madrasee  or  a  pig-tailed  Mohammedan  from  northwestern  India  over 
a  handful  of  green  plantains.  But  most  numerous  of  all  were  guffaw- 
ing negro  women,  almost  invariably  carrying  something  on  their 
heads,  be  it  only  a  bottle  of  Dutch  rum  sitting  bolt  upright.  The 
negroes,  especially  of  the  younger  generation,  to  whom  labor  bears 
the  stigma  of  the  lowly  Javanese  or  Hindu,  consider  themselves  a 
kind  of  aristocracy  in  this  conglomerate  society.  The  negro  girl 
working  in  a  shop  and  dressing  in  modern  finery  is  too  nice  to  carry 
her  own  bundle;  she  is  followed  by  her  mother  in  the  old  native 
dress,  bearing  her  daughter's  burden.  A  negro  youth  whom  ian 
American  resident  hired  as  a  fireman  on  his  launch  appeared  in  a 
red  tie  and  patent  leather  shoes,  followed  by  his  mother  and  his 
grandmother,  carrying  his  baggage  on  their  heads. 

It  is  a  sturdy  man  who  can  live  day  after  day  at  a  Surinam 
dinner-table.  Not  only  is  the  food  as  heavy  as  only  Dutch  or 
German  food  can  be,  but  it  is  the  custom  to  eat  five  meals  a  day, 
Over  at  "Sally's  Hotel,"  where  nearly  all  visitors  come  sooner  or  later 
to  accept  the  ministrations  of  a  proprietress  whose  Dutch  training  is 
tempered  by  African  cheerfulness,  we  were  served  coffee  upon  rising, 
a  heavy  breakfast  as  soon  as  we  descended  to  the  dining-room,  dinner 
from  twelve  to  two,  an  afternoon  "tea"  that  was  a  meal  in  itself, 
and  Kond  Avondcten — "cold  evening  eats" — of  generous  quantity  and 
staying  quality  from  seven  to  nine.  Once  upon  a  time  ice-cream  was 
imported  from  New  York  in  special  cold-storage  compartments,  but 
ihose  glorious  days  are  gone. 

Had  Surinam  confined  itself  to  its  legal  language.  I  should  have 
been  tongue-tied,  except  for  its  slight  similarity  to  Gemian.  But 
every  educated  person,  from  boys  or  girls  to  even  the  negro  policeman 
on  the  street-corners,  spoke  more  or  less  English ;  and  those  so  low 
as  not  to  know  any  of  that  did  not  speak  Dutch,  either,  but  a  "pidgin" 
mixture  of  all  the  tongues  that  have  mingled  in  the  history  of  Dutch 
Guiana,   called   "taki-taki."   that   is,   "talkee-talkee."     Signs   in    Para- 


5/8  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

maribo  are  sometimes   in  both   tongues,   as   when   a   watering-trough 

,  .  (AHet  Drinkbaar        1      a  n    ,  •  i 

bears    the    warnmg:    -(  ,^     ,  .  .     .  y    All    higher    government 

*="      ^Np  boen  vo  dnngh  j  ^         '^ 

officials  speak  English  fluently,  though  legally  their  duties  can  only 
be  carried  on  in  Dutch.  An  American  resident  one  day  had  business 
with  the  minister  of  finance.  They  both  belonged  to  the  club,  and 
drank,  smoked,  and  played  cards  together  almost  nightly;  yet  the 
American  was  obliged  to  hire  one  of  the  two  official  interpreters  in 
the  colony — as  well  as  to  borrow  a  frock-coat  and  a  silk  hat — before 
he  could  be  admitted  to  the  official  presence,  where  everything  he  said 
was  turned  into  Dutch  and  the  replies  of  the  minister  translated  into 
English. 

One  morning  I  drifted  into  the  Supreme  Court.  Five  barefoot 
negroes  were  on  trial,  two  of  them  being  English  and  three  French. 
They  were  part  of  a  gang  of  marauders  who  had  attacked  a  gold 
mine  once  claimed  by  France,  but  which  the  boundary  award  had 
given  to  the  Dutch.  Several  others  had  been  shot  by  soldiers  sent 
against  them — and  rumor  had  it  that  most  of  the  stolen  gold  found 
its  way  into  the  troopers'  pockets.  Five  Dutchmen  in  black  rebes 
with  white  starched  stocks  at  the  neck,  their  pallid  faces  in  striking 
contrast  to  the  consensus  of  complexion,  flabby  with  good  living  and 
no  exercise,  entered  and  sat  down  at  a  semicircular  table.  In  the 
center  was  the  wrinkled,  worldly-wise  old  chief  justice — his  son-in- 
law  was  said  to  be  by  far  the  best  lawyer  to  win  a  case  before  the 
court — flanked  by  two  assistants,  and  they  in  turn  by  the  similarly 
garbed  prosecuting  attorney  and  the  clerk  of  the  court.  All  five 
of  them  were  plainly  indoor  characters  and  had  the  "square"  heads 
of  their  race.  Over  the  center  chair,  the  back  of  it  carved  with  the 
coat-of-arms  of  the  Netherlands,  was  a  large  portrait  of  Queen 
Wilhelmina.  A  Frenchman  being  called  upon  to  testify,  an  inter- 
preter was  summoned,  though  the  witness  spoke  tolerable  English 
and  all  the  court  spoke  both  French  and  English  perfectly.  The 
entire  trial  was  conducted  by  the  chief  justice,  who  asked  all  ques- 
tions— in  Dutch,  as  required  by  law — which  were  turned  into  French 
or  English,  and  the  answers  rendered  back  into  the  legal  tongue 
again,  though  the  impatient  jurist  soon  tired  of  waiting  for  the  un- 
necessary translation  and  sped  swiftly  on.  Indeed,  he  so  far  forgot 
himself  at  times,  particularly  when  the  hands  of  the  clock  began 
to  approach  the  hour  of  dinner  and  the  afternoon  siesta,  as  to  ask 
the  question  in  the  language  of  the  witness,  or  to  correct  the  inter' 


ROAMING  THE  THREE  GUIANAS  579 

preter,  whose  knowledge  of  the  tongue  which  he  professed  to  know 
was  so  shaky  that  the  justice  often  turned  the  whole  answer  into 
Dutch  before  the  interpreter  had  begun.  For  patois-speaking  French 
negroes  another  interpreter  was  called,  though  he  spoke  exactly  the 
same  French  as  the  other— while  the  "English"  of  the  man  legally 
intrusted  with  that  tongue  was  eminently  West  Indian. 

The  colony  is  governed  directly  from  Holland,  officials,  from  the 
governor  down  to  the  last  pasty-faced  clerk,  being  sent  out  by  the 
mother  country.  It  has  never  been  self-supporting — at  least,  to  the 
people  of  Holland  it  is  a  constant  expense,  though  the  queen  personally 
gets  tidy  sums  every  year  from  her  extensive  Surinam  estates ;  hence 
Holland  feels  itself  justified  in  making  it  a  dumping-ground  for 
political  pets.  These  are  sent  out  for  five  years,  after  which  they 
serve  a  Hke  term  in  the  Dutch  East  Indies  and  retire  to  Holland  on 
a  pension  for  a  life  of  Dutch  contentment.  Naturally,  under  such 
circumstances  they  do  not  spend  a  cent  more  than  is  necessary,  never 
acquire  property  in  the  colony — except  in  the  rare  case  of  a  man 
marrying  a  native  whom  he  is  ashamed  to  take  home  with  him — 
and  have  no  interest  in  developing  it.  There  is  much  grumbling 
against  this  state  of  affairs,  though  to  one  inclined  to  compare  it 
with  its  Latin-American  neighbors  the  government  seems  worthy  of 
praise.  Some  claim  that  the  natives  themselves  could  govern  better, 
which  is  doubtful.  The  greatest  complaint  appears  to  be  that  the 
appointed  officials  have  no  knowledge  of,  or  interest  in,  the  colony, 
wishing  only  to  serve  their  time  as  easily,  and  go  back  to  Holland 
as  rich,  as  possible.  There  are  few  charges  of  corruption  on  the 
Brazilian  scale,  but  the  natives,  especially  of  the  class  that  might 
aspire  to  political  office,  never  tire  of  pointing  to  the  backwardness 
of  the  colony  as  proof  of  their  contentions.  Just  when  the  rest  of 
the  world  was  putting  in  electricity  a  Dutch  gas  company  operating 
in  all  the  colonies  of  the  Netherlands  got  an  exclusive  concession  to 
light  Paramaribo  for  twenty-five  years;  therefore,  though  one  may 
have  electric-light  in  one's  own  house,  no  wire  can  be  run  across 
or  under  a  public  street,  nor  may  any  public  building  be  so  lighted 
before  1932.  A  tramway  might  be  legally  operated,  but  neither  the 
cars  nor  the  power-house  could  be  lighted  with  electricity.  It  is 
possible,  as  certain  outspoken  natives  contend,  that  there  is  some 
connection  between  this  arrangement  and  the  fact  that  the  former 
governor  was  handed  a  large  bundle  of  gas   shares,  "merely  as   a 


58o  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATy\GONIA 

friendly  present  and  a  free-will  offering,"  on  the  day  he  sailed  back 
to  Holland. 

Jim  Lawton  was  manager  of  several  plantations  owned  by  an 
American  corporation.  We  chugged  in  a  motor-boat  down  the 
Suriname  into  the  Commewijne,  and  later  up  to  the  Cottica,  to  visit 
one  of  them.  The  country  was  deadly  flat,  and  all  our  way  was 
lined  with  mangrove  roots  uncovered  by  the  tide,  resembling  ugly 
yellow  teeth  from  which  the  gums  had  receded.  Not  far  from  the 
capital  we  passed  a  big  sugar  plantation  of  which  the  Queen  of 
Holland  is  chief  stockholder,  as  she  is  of  many  others  in  the  colony, 
but  the  manager  of  which  was  a  Scotchman.  Under  him  were  six 
overseers,  six  "drivers,"  generally  Hindu  coolies  or  Javanese  who 
have  worked  out  their  time,  and  two  thousand  workmen,  one  for 
each  acre.  Many  of  the  largest  estates  along  the  rivers  and  coast 
belong  to  men  who  have  never  been  outside  Holland,  so  that  when 
the  cacao  is  attacked  by  a  tropical  disease,  or  a  similar  disaster  sweeps 
the  colony,  there  is  neither  money  nor  intelligent  ownership  on  hand 
to  combat  it. 

The  manager  of  "Nieuw  Clarenbeck,"  a  white  Surinamer  who  met 
tjs  at  the  landing-stage,  seemed  to  speak  all  languages, — Dutch,  French, 
English,  Chinese,  Javanese,  Bengalee,  Hindustani,  "taki-taki" — ^though 
merely  enough  of  each  to  "get  it  across,"  so  that  they  all  sounded  as 
many  kinds  of  food  boiled  together  in  the  same  kettle  taste.  Here 
were  six  hundred  acres,  with  fifty  Javanese  laborers,  thifty-five 
Hindus,  and  some  odds  and  ends,  among  them  a  convict  of  Mada- 
gascar who  had  escaped  from  Cayenne.  As  we  wandered  about  the 
muddy  plantation,  slapping  incessantly  at  mosquitoes  and  mopping 
our  faces  in  the  thick,  humid  heat,  we  were  greeted  in  many  tongues, — 
"Dag,  Mynheer!"  "Salaam,  sahib!"  "Tabay!"  "Ody,  masara !"  or 
"O-fa-yoo-day !"  "Bon  jour!"  and  even  "Good  mahnin',  sah!"  There 
was  also  a  Chinese  greeting  from  the  plantation  shopkeeper.  The 
estate  was  cut  up  by  little  irrigation  ditches,  with  small  poles  as 
bridges,  and  we  had  many  splendid  chances  to  fall  to  the  waist  or 
neck  in  their  slime.  Cacao  was  the  most  important  crop;  after  which 
came  coffee,  with  the  trees  shaded  and  the  Liberian  berries  large  as 
plums.  There  were  a  few  rubber-trees,  tapped  in  the  Oriental  style, 
quite  different  from  the  Brazilian,  and  instead  of  being  smoked  into 
balls,  the  sap  was  set  out  in  pans  and  treated  with  citric  acid,  after 
which  the  "cream"  is  skimmed  off  in  a  pancake  of  the  finest  rubber, 
called  "plantation  biscuit."     Quassia  wood,  of  bitter  taste,  was  once 


ROAMING  THE  THREE  GUIANAS  581 

ail  important  export  to  Germany,  where  the  importers  claimed  it  was 
used  to  clear  the  hop-fields  of  bugs;  but  since  the  combined  disasters 
of  war  and  a  cable  from  Milwaukee  reading,  "We  are  not  allowed 
to  use  quassia  in  making  beer  in  the  United  States,  as  is  done  in 
Germany,"  the  stuff  had  been  piled   up   for  cordvvood. 

The  problems  of  a  Surinam  estate  are  legion,  with  that  of  labor 
heading  the  list.     Javanese  are  somewhat  cleaner  than  the  Hindus, 
and  they  will  do   whatever  they  are   ordered;  but  they   are   by  no 
means    model    workmen.     The    method    of    recruiting    them    in    the 
crowded  Island  of  Java  (with  a  population  of  32,000,000!)  is  to  secure 
a   few  pretty  girls  of  the  town  and,  exhibiting  them   in  the   larger 
cities,  entice  men  away  on  a  live-year  contract,  their  fare  paid  and 
a  certain  sum  of  money  advanced  to  them   for  their   last   spree   in 
their   native   land.     Obviously,    this   brings   the    scum    of   Java,    both 
male  and   female.     The  plantation  owner  who  wishes  to  hire  these 
imported   laborers   pays   the   government    183   gulden    for   each   one, 
which  gives  him  the   right   to  his   indentured   labor   for   five   years. 
But  that  is  only  the  beginning.     He  must  pay  the  government  doctor 
five  gulden  a  year  per  coolie  for  periodic  examinations,  and  buy  any 
medicine  he  orders.     There  is  a  five  gulden  yearly  head-tax  on  each 
laborer;  they  must  be   furnished  dwellings  after  a   design  fixed  by 
the  government,  wath  new   improvements  every  year.     If  there  are 
fifteen  or  more  children  on  an  estate,  the  owner  must  build  a  nursery 
and  provide  a  nurse  for  each  fifteen,  or  fraction  thereof,  who  shall 
wash  each  child  twice  a  day  and  see  that  it  gets  the  specified  govern- 
ment diet;  if  the  children  are  old  enough,  he  must  also  provide  a 
school  and  a  teacher — generally  a  black  Dutchman.     The   employer 
must  have  hospital  beds  for  ten  per  cent,  of  his  laborers,  and  must 
furnish  them  a  specified  diet  when  they  are  ill  and  lose  their  time 
as  workmen.     If  a  laborer  goes  to  jail,  the  duties  of  and  loss  to  his 
employer  are   similar;   there   have  been   cases   of  men   sentenced   to 
long  terms  a  few  weeks  after  being  hired  from  the  government,  making 
their  cost  to  the  plantation  owner  a  total  loss.      If   an   indentured 
laborer  runs  away  before  his  five  years  is  up,  he  can  be  brought  bac"k 
by  force,  though  the  government  is  ordinarily  remiss  in  pursuing  him. 
The  women   are   contracted   in  the  same   way   as   the   men,   though 
children  may  not  be  indentured.     Men  and  women  work  seven  hours 
a  day  in  the  fields,  or  ten  under  roofs,  at  "task  work"  which  must 
pay  them  at  least  sixty  Dutch  cents — a  quarter  or  a  shilling — a  day. 
Though  their  original  cost  is  somewhat  less.  East  Indian  coolies. 


582  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

^vhom  the  government  started  to  replace  with  its  own  subjects  somv 
twenty  years  ago,  are  more  troublesome,  particularly  because  they 
are  British  subjects  under  direct  care  of  the  British  consul,  to  whom 
they  complain  at  every  imaginable  opportunity.  They  do  not  mix 
with  the  Javanese,  but  live  in  specified  houses  some  distance  from 
them,  in  even  greater  filth,  as  is  natural  in  a  race  forced  to  give  its 
attentions  to  ceremonials  and  superstitions  rather  than  to  personal 
cleanliness.  A  Hindu  woman  cannot  be  used  as  a  house-servant,  not 
merely  because  of  her  personal  habits,  but  because  she  will  not  touch 
beef  or  cow-grease  and  has  many  other  troublesome  heathenish 
notions.  The  East  Indians  lose  some  of  their  caste  nonsense  in  the 
colony,  permitting  their  brass  drinking-vessels,  or  even  their  food  to 
be  touched  by  alien  hands  without  throwing  it  away ;  yet  they  still 
prepare  their  own  meals  in  accordance  with  their  peculiar  religious 
scruples.  The  Hindus  "cast  spells"  upon  their  enemies ;  but  the 
Javanese,  and  in  some  cases  the  negroes,  take  the  more  effective 
revenge  of  mixing  deadly  concoctions,  and  even  the  educated  people 
of  Dutch  Guiana  are  more  or  less  afraid  of  being  poisoned  by  dis- 
gruntled employees.  There  are  twerity-three  coolie  holidays  a  year 
which  the  plantation  manager  is  obliged  to  observe,  besides  Sundays 
and  a  number  of  Dutch  and  Javanese  holidays,  so  that  he  must  keep 
a  complicated  calendar  and  lay  plans  far  ahead  in  order  not  to  have 
his  crops  rotting  in  the  fields  when  they  should  be  picked. 

I  attended  the  weekly  pay-day  on  Saturday  afternoon.  The  Java- 
nese laborers  had  from  forty  to  seventy  Dutch  cents  left  of  their 
week's  wages,  the  rest  having  already  been  taken  out  in  advances. 
When  the  amount  was  very  low,  the  manager  kept  it  and  bought 
food  for  the  man  to  whom  it  was  due,  so  that  he  could  not  gamble 
it  away.  But  he  is  almost  as  likely  to  gamble  away  the  food  or 
his  garments,  or — as  frequently  happens — his  wife.  In  marked  con- 
trast to  their  Hindu  sisters,  the  Javanese  women  never  wear  jewelry, 
because  their  men  lose  it  all  in  games  of  chance,  and  their  apparel 
habitually  consists  of  a  loose  jacket,  barely  covering  the  breast,  and 
a  square  of  gay  cloth  wrapped  about  the  waist  and  tucked  in,  showing 
a  few  inches  of  the  abdomen  and  reaching  a  bit  below  the  knees. 
The  Hindu  workmen  and  women,  on  the  other  hand,  received  as 
much  as  four  gulden  ($i.6o)  each,  and  grasped  it  like  misers,  raising 
their  voices  to  heaven  if  it  seemed  to  be  a  cent  short.  With  one 
people  the  most  inveterate  of  spendthrifts  and  the  other  penurious 
beyond  words,  it  is  not  strange  that  the  two  races  do  not  find  each 


ROAMING  THE  THREE  GUIAXAS  583 

oilier  congenial.  But  there  are  other  important  cHfTerences.  The 
Hindus  fight  among  themselves  and  frequently  indulge  in  veritable 
riots.  They  are  exceedingly  jealous  of  their  women  and  quick  to 
revenge  any  slight  to  their  domestic  honor,  though  the  women  are 
lUJt  particularly  chaste.  The  white  manager  of  a  neighboring  estate 
only  a  short  time  before  had  been  cut  up  into  nearly  a  hundred  pieces 
for  dallying  with  the  wife  of  one  of  his  East  Indians.  One  day  a 
coolie  came  running  to  the  manager  of  "Nieuw  Clarenbeck"  and  said 
that  he  had  caught  his  wife  in  company  with  another  man  and  had 
locked  them  both  in  his  house.  The  manager  gave  the  male  intruder 
a  sound  thrashing  and  hoped  the  matter  would  be  dropped ;  but  the 
moment  he  got  a  chance  the  outraged  husband  attackerl  his  wife 
with  a  cutlass,  gashing  her  breasts,  both  wrists  and  both  ankles, 
slashing  her  several  times  across  the  forehead,  and  all  but  severing 
a  foot  and  a  hand.  She  was  in  the  plantation  hospital,  never  able 
to  work  again,  and  the  man  was  in  jail — wliile  the  plantation  was  out 
the  money  it  had  paid  for  their  five  years'  services.  The  Javanese, 
however,  instead  of  being  stern  in  their  marital  relations,  are  virtually 
devoid  of  conjugal  morality.  It  is  a  common  thing  among  them  to 
trade  wives  for  a  day  or  a  week,  to  gamble  away  their  wives,  or  to 
borrow  the  wife  of  a  friend  if  their  own  happens  to  be  out  of  reach. 
The  man  who  becomes  enamored  of  a  Javanese  woman  does  not 
sneak  about  in  the  night  seeking  a  rendezvous ;  he  goes  to  the  woman's 
husband  and  gives  him  a  small  coin,  or  carries  her  off  without  personal 
danger,  so  long  as  he  sends  her  home  again  with  fifteen  or  twenty 
cents  for  her  husband  to  hazard  in  his  games.  This  point  of  view 
of  the  betel-nut  chewers  is  more  or  less  that  of  the  whole  colony, 
except  among  the  Hindus  and  the  whites;  families  have  considerable 
difficulty  in  getting  domestic  help,  but  an  unmarried  man  may  have 
his  choice  of  a  hundred  youthful  housekeepers. 

When  their  five-year  term  is  up,  the  indentured  laborers  may 
become  independent  planters,  or  they  may  hire  out  again  for  from 
one  to  five  years.  Many  of  the  coolies  acquire  land,  which  is  so  easily 
<1one  here  that  many  come  from  both  British  Guiana  and  the  Island 
of  Trinidad  to  settle  down,  and  plantation  owners  complain  that  they 
are  constantly  being  forced  to  send  for  new  laborers.  If  the  coolie 
hires  out  again,  he  does  so  at  his  old  wage  and  a  bonus  at  the  end 
of  the  year.  Not  so  the  Javanese ;  he  demands  an  advance  equal  lO 
several  months'  wages,  and  gambles  it  away  in  a  single  night.  The 
manager  pointed  out  to  me  one  of  his  laborers,  the  gay  cloth  worn 


584  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

by  all  men  of  his  race  about  his  brow,  his  teeth  jet  black  from  betel- 
nut,  who  had  been  paid  a  month's  salary  and  a  bonus  on  the  night  that 
his  five-year  contract  ended.  He  lost  that  in  less  than  two  hours, 
came  back  and  signed  for  five  years  more,  receiving  an  advance  of 
a  hundred  gulden ;  returned  at  ten  in  the  evening  to  borrow  fifty  cents 
with  which  to  buy  food — and  gambled  that  away ! 

Yet  the  Javanese  are  the  most  docile  of  all  the  conglomeration  of 
races  in  Dutch  Guiana,  with  the  coolies  next,  though  the  protection 
of  the  British  consul  is  likely  to  make  the  latter  somewhat  uppish.  The 
negroes  are  haughty,  as  well  as  lazy;  the  Chinese  are  proud,  but  try 
to  be  "hail  fellows"  and  even  learn  "taki-taki"  for  the  sake  of  trade— 
for,  with  rare  exceptions,  they  are  shopkeepers.  The  government 
regulates  even  the  stores  on  the  plantations,  and  not  only  does  an 
immigration  commissioner  speed  about  the  country  in  a  swift  launch, 
inquiring  whether  laborers  have  any  complaint  to  make  against  their 
employers,  but  a  paternal  government  inspector  tells  each  plantation 
just  how  much  it  can  charge  the  Chinaman  for  the  privilege  of 
running  the  estate  store  and  exactly  what  prices  he  can  demand  of 
the  laborers.  No  one  knows  what  moment  the  inspector  may  drop  in, 
perhaps  to  carry  off  samples  of  stock  for  examination  by  the  govern- 
ment chemist,  perhaps  to  condemn  a  barrel  of  flour  or  a  keg  of  meat 
and  order  them  thrown  into  the  river.  At  "Nieuw  Clarenbeck"  the 
Chinaman  paid  sixty  gulden  a  month  for  rent  and  store  rights — 
and  was  rapidly  getting  rich,  sending  his  money  back  to  China.  The 
Celestial  is  so  much  brighter  than  the  Hindu  or  the  Javanese  that 
even  when  he  mingles  his  blood  with  the  negro  his  descendants  are 
more  reliable  and  business-like,  having  the  commercial  instincts  of 
the  father  and  at  the  same  time  being  more  sociable  fellows.  The 
cross  between  the  negro  and  the  coolie,  on  the  other  hand,  is  surly 
and  seldom  worthy  of  the  least  confidence. 

There  is  a  little  railroad  from  Paramaribo  to  Dam — a  place  one 
is  sure  to  mention  twice :  once  in  asking  for  a  ticket,  and  again  after 
hearing  the  price  of  it — called  the  "Coloniale  Spoorwegen."  It  is 
a  government  road  of  meter  gauge,  a  hundred  and  eight  miles  long,  and 
one  pays  a  fare  of  fifteen  gulden,  or  six  cents  a  mile,  for  the  privilege 
of  sitting  on  hard  wooden  benches  in  box-like  little  cars  of  European 
appearance  and  lack  of  convenience,  on  a  single  train  that  goes  up-coun- 
try every  Tuesday  and  comes  down  again  on  Wednesday,  We  screeched 
through  one  of  the  main  streets  of  the  capital  and  only  city  in  the 
colony,   containing  more   <^han   half   its   population,   into    fertile   flat- 


ROAMING  THE  THREE  GUIANAS 


50D 


lands  which  soon  turned  to  wooded  country  with  occasional  board 
and  thatch  hamlets  or  isolated  huts,  then  to  almost  snow-white  sand 
that  did  not  promise  any  fertility,  even  with  irrigation.  Black  police- 
men in  blue  uniforms  and  carrying  short  swords  came  through  the 
cars  and  took  a  complete  biography  of  everyone  on  board,  even  to 
one's  religion.  The  train  stopped  at  every  bush  station  of  three  or 
more  huts,  usually  to  unload  men,  or  their  junk,  who  struck  off 
through  jungle  paths  toward  placer  mines.  Some  of  these  are  im- 
portant establishments,  with  thatched  villages  housing  fifty  or  sixty 
black  workmen  and  stamp-mills  through  which  a  whole  hill  is  passed, 
to  come  out  a  marble  of  gold  and  amalgam  that  can  be  held  in  the 
hollow  of  the  hand ;  some  are  the  private  and  individual  diggings  of 
"pork-knockers."  Lone  prospectors,  mainly  West  Indian  negroes, 
who  by  law  may  wash  for  gold  even  on  the  concessions  of  others, 
are  so  called  because,  often  setting  out  with  insufficient  supphes,  they 
soon  come  knocking  at  doors  and  asking  for  something  to  eat — "a 
little  pork  or  anything."  Even  the  verb,  to  "go  pork-knocking,"  has 
become  an  accepted  one  in  the  popular  language  of  Dutch  and  British 
Guiana.  English  was  more  often  heard  on  the  train  than  Dutch ; 
everyone  seemed  to  speak  it,  or  at  least  to  find  it  near  enough  the 
native  "taki-taki"  to  catch  or  express  an  idea.  The  white  roadbed 
became  painful  to  the  eyes,  and  white  men  long  resident  in  the  colony 
asserted  that  this  glare  from  much  of  its  soil  in  time  proved  perma- 
nently injurious. 

In  the  afternoon  we  came  to  the  Suriname  River  again,  here  far 
narrower,  but  swift  and  deep.  The  buttresses  of  a  bridge  had  been 
built,  but  the  few  remaining  passengers  crossed  in  a  cable-car,  like  that 
to  the  top  of  the  "Sugar  Loaf"  in  Rio,  a  hundred  feet  or  more  above 
the  water.  Naturally,  a  weekly  schedule  that  requires  two  trains  and 
a  cable  station  to  make  its  run  must  charge  fabulous  passenger  and 
freight  rates.  We  spent  more  than  an  hour  getting  our  cargo — 
largely  oil  products  and  flour  from  the  United  States — into  the  little 
three-car  train  on  the  other  side;  then  the  conductor  put  on  a  new 
kind  of  cap,  and  we  were  off  again.  Here  the  soil  was  reddish  and 
looked  more  fertile,  and  we  seemed  to  have  risen  to  a  slight  savannah 
with  a  cooler  wind,  though  for  the  most  part  we  were  surrounded  by 
the  same  monotonous  jungle  that  had  hemmed  me  in  almost  inces- 
santly for  weeks  past.  But  here  it  was  enlivened  by  what  to  me  was 
the  most  interesting  of  the  many  races  that  inhabit  the  Guianas, — the 
Boschnegcr,  or  "Bush  Negroes." 


586  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

In  the  early  history  of  the  colony  her  African  slaves,  said  to  have 
come  from  more  warlike  tribes  than  most  of  those  brought  to  the 
New  World,  revolted  and,  but  for  the  help  of  the  Caribs  and  a 
patched-up  truce,  would  undoubtedly  have  driven  the  white  planters 
into  the  sea.  In  British  Guiana  they  were  eventually  conquered  and 
driven  out.  The  Dutch,  on  the  other  hand,  made  peace  with  them, 
not  only  acknowledging  their  independence,  but  promising  to  pay  them 
tribute,  which  they  do  to  this  day.  The  descendants  of  these  black 
insurgents,  unlike  the  "maroons"  of  Jamaica,  have  gone  completely  back 
to  savagery  and  live  like  wild  Indians,  or  like  their  ancestors  in  the 
African  bush,  wearing  only  a  loin-cloth,  dwelling  in  grass  huts,  eating 
cassava  and  other  jungle  products,  and  talking  a  corruption  of  Dutch 
and  several  other  languages  with  which  they  have  come  in  contact, 
which  the  Dutch  themselves  cannot  understand.  It  is  estimated  that 
there  are  eight  thousand  of  these  wild  negroes  in  Dutch  Guiana,  divided 
into  three  principal  tribes,  Saramacca,  Becoe,  and  Djoeka,  each  ruled 
over  by  its  "gran  man"  ("a"  always  as  in  "far"),  and  its  tribal  elders, 
while  several  thousand  more,  known  as  "bonis,"  inhabit  French  Guiana. 

A  few  of  these  black  children  of  nature  had  appeared  before  we 
crossed  the  Suriname;  now  they  burst  forth  frequently  from  the  sur- 
rounding bush.  The  only  evidence  of  humanity,  except  the  railroad, 
was  an  occasional  sheet-iron  station  building;  yet  we  halted  now  and 
then  where  the  dark  mouth  of  a  path  broke  the  dense  wall  of  forest- 
jungle  on  either  side  to  unload  rice,  flour,  and  oil  for  the  placer  miners 
and  "balata  bleeders"  back  in  the  bush.  In  some  places  wild  negroes  had 
come  down  to  act  as  carriers.  They  were  splendid  physical  specimens, 
tall  and  more  magnificently  built  than  any  race  I  had  yet  seen  in  South 
America,  fit  to  arouse  the  envy  of  any  white  Sandow — except  that, 
being  paddlers  of  dugouts  rather  than  walkers,  their  shoulders  and 
arms  were  overdeveloped  in  proportion  to  their  legs.  Erect  and  haughty 
as  Indians,  without  a  hint  of  the  servility  we  commonly  associate  with 
negroes,  they  were  proof  that  the  African  who  has  returned  to  his 
natural  state  in  the  wilderness  is  preferable  to  the  negro  who  has  re- 
verted to  his  natural  state  in  the  cesspools  of  cities  and  the  rags  of 
civilization.  Though  noticeably  smaller,  the  women  and  girls — naked 
except  from  waist  to  thighs — who  came  down  to  peer  out  of  the  forest 
and  see  the  train  pass  were  equally  fine  specimens  of  the  human  animal, 
the  young  ones  with  plump,  protruding  breasts,  shapely  waists,  and 
more  often  than  not  a  naked  baby  astride  one  hip.  The  men  had  earrings, 
bracelets,  rings  even  on  their  forefingers,  charms  of  shells  and  the  like 


ROAMING  THE  THREE  GUIANAS  587 

about  the  ankles,  and  so  many  adornments,  in  contrast  to  the  females,  as 
to  suggest  that  they  forcibly  took  them  away  from  tlieir  weaker  sisters. 
Such  cloth  as  they  wore  was  of  gayest  color  and  crazy-quilt  pattern  ; 
their  short  hair  was  done  up  in  "Topsy"  braids  sticking  out  in  all  direc- 
tions and  tied  with  many-colored  ribbons ;  about  arms  and  legs,  just  be- 
low the  knees  and  above  the  elbows,  they  wore  tight  rings  or  cords, 
evidently  believing,  like  the  Indians  of  Amazonia,  that  these  protect  them 
from  the  ravenous  pirainha;  and  the  abdomens  of  both  men  and  women 
were  tattooed,  or,  more  exactly,  pricked  into  relief  figures  resembling 
countless  black  warts.  More  superstitious  than  the  wild  Indians, 
and  just  wise  enough  to  know  a  kodak  by  sight,  they  were  not  to  be 
caught  unawares  for  a  "por-traif,"  as  the  word  remains  even  in  "taki- 
taki." 

Dam  is  most  succinctly  described  by  adding  an  "n"  and  an  excla- 
mation point.  It  consists  of  the  end  of  the  railroad  line,  which  some 
day  in  the  distant  future  hopes  to  go  on  to  the  Brazilian  border.  The 
only  white  men  left  since  crossing  the  river  were  the  little  Dutch 
engineer  and  myself.  I  went  with  him  and  the  rest  of  the  train  crew 
to  a  clean,  well-screened  little  bungalow,  where  we  pooled  our  lunches, 
but  the  assertion  of  the  dusky  conductor,  whose  English  was  "picked 
up,"  that  he  was  "snorking  too  much"  proved  only  too  true,  and  I  soon 
carried  my  hammock  out  into  the  night.  After  some  search  I  swung 
it  from  the  switch-post  to  the  back  end  of  our  first-class  car,  diag- 
onally across  the  track,  and  turned  in  again.  There  was,  of  course,  the 
danger  that  another  train  might  dash  around  the  curve  into  me,  but 
as  the  company  would  have  had  to  order  it  made  in  Holland,  carry 
it  piecemeal  across  the  river  by  cable,  set  it  up,  and  run  the  thirty 
miles  from  the  cable  station,  the  risk  was  not  great. 

At  least  there  was  a  fine  collection  of  "Bush  Negroes"  in  Dam.  A 
hundred  or  more  of  them,  including  whole  families  among  whom  there 
was  not  cloth  enough  for  a  single  garment,  had  come  down  the 
river,  which  here  forms  a  rocky  falls,  to  carry  back  into  the  bush  in 
their  canoes  the  supplies  brought  by  the  weekly  train,  and  they  had 
hung  their  hammocks  under  a  long  sheet-iron  roof  on  poles  provided 
by  the  government.  All  of  them  had  the  air  of  being  as  ready  to  fight 
as  Indians  on  the  war-path;  yet  they  were  childish  in  many  ways, 
too,  jumping  upon  the  train  every  time  it  moved  a  foot  in  switching 
and  acting  in  general  like  boys  of  ten.  They  were  the  exact  antithesis 
of  Indians  in  showing,  rather  than  hiding,  their  feelings,  and  had  all 
the  African's  gaiety  and  boisterous  laughter.     In   their   encampment 


588  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

now  feebly  lighted  by  weird  torches,  they  were  indulging  in  music, 
chatter,  and  apparently  in  dancing,  until  one  might  have  fancied 
oneself  in  the  heart  of  Africa.  They  seemed  to  be  more  contented 
with  their  lot  than  the  Indians,  as  if  they  still  had  memories  of  the 
slave  days  of  their  ancestors  and  realized  that  much  more  fully 
what  freedom  means. 

On  the  return  trip  we  picked  up  much  gold.  At  every  station, 
and  at  some  mere  stops,  negroes,  clothed  and  usually  English-speaking, 
handed  the  conductor  small  packages  wrapped  in  scraps  of  paper, 
but  sealed  with  a  red  seal,  the  name  of  the  owner  crudely  written 
on  each.  I  soon  learned  that  these  contained  gold-dust,  and  for 
every  one  of  them  the  conductor  had  to  make  out  a  report,  which  the 
negro  certified  with  a  seal  he  carried,  after  which  the  conductor  put 
the  package  in  his  tin  box.  Some  of  them  weighed  several  pounds. 
Before  we  were  halfway  in  the  conductor  had  more  than  $12,000  worth 
of  gold,  for  all  of  which  he  was  responsible,  though  he  received  not 
a  cent  extra  for  the  trouble  above  his  scanty  wage  of  thirty  dollars 
a  month  and  a  gulden  as  expense  money  on  each  trip.  No  wonder 
he  said  something  about  "one  hand  washing  the  other"  and  gave  me 
no  receipt  for  the  fare  I  paid  from  Dam  back  to  the  cable-station. 

When  we  came  to  Kwakoegron  every  person  on  the  train  had  to 
get  off  to  be  searched  for  gold.  All  passengers  and  employees,  carry- 
ing their  hand-baggage,  were  herded  into  a  big  chicken-wire  cage, 
where  they  were  examined  one  by  one  by  black  policemen.  Personally, 
whether  out  of  respect  for  my  nationality  or  because  I  looked  too 
simple  to  think  of  smuggling,  the  officer  who  stepped  with  me  into  one 
of  the  alcove  closets  opening  off  the  enclosure  was  satisfied  with  pat- 
ting my  pockets  and  making  me  open  my  kodak ;  but  many  travelers 
are  compelled  to  strip  naked  while  black  policemen  examine  even  the 
seams  of  their  garments.  There  is  a  negress  on  hand  for  similar  ex- 
aminations of  her  own  sex,  and  several  times  I  heard  of  an  English 
woman  resident  who,  having  once  been  caught  smuggling  gold,  was 
forced  to  strip  every  time  she  passed  through  Kwakoegron  on  her 
way  to  town.  Even  minor  surgical  operations  are  sometimes  per- 
formed on  suspects,  not  always  without  results.  Not  merely  the 
passengers  and  their  bags,  but  the  entire  train  from  end  to  end  was 
examined  with  meticulous  care.  Gold  has  been  discovered  hidden 
away  in  every  imaginable  place  on  the  cars,  even  stuck  on  the  trucks 
or  inside  the  wheels.  The  packages  in  charge  of  the  conductor  are 
also  examined,  and  if  a  seal  is  found  broken  he  is  held  in  jail  until 


ROAMING  THE  THREE  GUIANAS  589 

it  is  proved  that  none  of  the  gold  is  missing.  The  negro  policemen 
get  a  percentage  and  promotion  for  finding  stolen  gold,  or  for  de- 
tecting attempts  to  smuggle  it,  and  are  said  to  be  so  proud  of  their 
jobs  that  they  seldom  succumb  to  temptation. 

The  gold  fields  of  Dutch  Guiana  are  above  Kwakoegron,  and  the 
purpose  of  the  barrier  is  to  prevent  gold  from  getting  out  without  paying 
the  seven  per  cent,  ad  valorem  tax  to  the  government.  Miners  are 
said  to  favor  the  method,  because  it  does  away  with  stealing  by 
workmen.  Yet  it  is  scarcely  worth  while  to  try  to  smuggle  gold  into 
town,  for  it  must  be  sold  secretly  to  "fences"  who  seldom  pay  as 
much  as  honest  gold  brings  after  going  through  the  government 
process.  Arrived  in  Paramaribo,  the  packages  held  by  the  con- 
ductor are  turned  over  to  the  police,  examined,  and  the  next  day  the 
owner  comes  and  pays  his  tax  and  then  sells  his  gold  to  a  registered 
dealer.  It  is  even  unlawful  for  the  man  who  dug  it  to  bring  his  own 
gold  to  town  with  him.  Government  officials  who  handle  the  yellow 
metal  are  reputed  to  be  honest,  but  not  so  much  can  be  said  for  the 
government  itself,  which  accepts  gold  stolen  in  French  Guiana,  merely 
charging  a  higher  tax  and  keeping  an  official  record  of  it.  Naturally, 
the  government  of  Cayenne  retaliates. 

I  saw  and  heard  much  more  of  the  "Bush  Negroes"  before  I  left 
Surinam.  Scattered  all  over  the  colony  between  the  well-settled 
coast  and  the  Indians  at  the  southern  end,  they  constitute  the  chief 
interest  of  Dutch  Guiana,  as  the  white  convicts  do  in  the  adjoining 
French  colony.  The  government  makes  no  attempt  to  rule  them,  no 
pretense  of  trying  to  bring  them  out  of  their  savagery ;  indeed,  it  pro- 
tects them  in  their  wild  state  and  gives  them  privileges  not  enjoyed  by 
white  residents, — as,  for  example,  the  right  to  carry  firearms  without 
a  license.  They  have  no  schools  or  other  civilizing  influence,  except 
a  few  missions  of  the  Moravians.  It  may  be  that  they  are  better  off 
under  this  plan ;  certainly  they  are  finer  specimens  of  manhood  than 
the  average  domesticated  negro.  All  those  I  saw  were  jet  black, 
but  there  are  said  to  be  rare  cases  of  their  mixing  with  the  whites, 
the  offspring  of  such  mixture  almost  invariably  losing  his  "bush" 
instinct  and  drifting  to  town.  Descended  from  some  of  the  hardiest 
tribes  of  Africa,  many  of  them  still  have  traditions  of  belonging  to 
the  wealthy  class  in  that  continent,  their  ancestors  owning  many 
cattle  and  having  been  captured  by  trickery.  The  men  make  good 
carriers  and  bush  guides,  but  are  incredibly  heavy  eaters.  Their 
principal    commerce    with    the   outside    world    is    bringing    wood    to 


590  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

town,  paddling  their  hollowed-out  tree-trunks,  often   forty  or  fifty 
feet  long,  in  and  out  of  the  network  of  rivers.     The  men  clear  a 
different  patch  of  jungle  every  year,  and  the  women  plant  cassava, 
rice,  bananas,  and  plantains,  and  do  all  the  manual  labor  about  the 
camp.     Polygamy  prevails,  and  the  relations  of  the  men  are  rather 
free,  though  the  women  are  held  strictly  to  account.     If  a  domestic 
misdemeanor   is  discovered,  a   conclave   is   held   and   both   the   man 
and  the  woman  are  beaten,  but  the  latter  usually  carries  her  marks 
the  longer.     When  a  "Bush  Negro"  dies,  his  body  is  placed  on  an 
elevated  platform  for  eight  days,  and  every  day  the  men  come  and 
rub  their  bodies  with  the  juice,  if  it  may  be  so  called,  of  the  corpse, 
for  the  double  purpose  of  adding  to  their  own  strength  and  insuring 
the  entrance  of  the  dead  man  into  their  heaven.    They  have  many  of 
the    superstitions,    strange    primitive    rites,    and    Mumbo-Jumbos    of 
their  African  ancestors.     Any  mark  called  a  charm  or  curse  before 
a  door  will  keep  them  from  entering  it.     Though  very  suspicious  of 
strangers,  those  who  have  won  their  confidence  find   them   staunch 
friends,  gay  and  good-hearted,  but  ready  to  do  anything  for  rum  or 
tobacco,  which  there  is  no  law  against  giving  them.     Never  having 
been  subdued,  they  fear  no  one,  and  live  under  their  own  tribal  laws, 
punishing  even  with  death  those  who  disobey  them,  without  govern- 
ment interference.    A  few  years  ago  four  West  Indian  blacks  stole  a 
"Bush  Negro's"  canoe  along  the  Maroni  River  and  left  him  to  struggle 
back  to  his   village  through  the   jungle.     Nearly   a   year   afterward 
the  West  Indians  returned  from  their  gold  prospecting  in  the  interior, 
passing  down  the  river  in  the  same  canoe.     The  owner  recognized  it, 
raced  back  to  his  village  and,  collecting  a  group  of  his  fellows,  over- 
took the  thieves  farther  down,  killed  them,  recovered  the  canoe,  and 
stood  the  heads  of  the  four  up  on  a  rock  jutting  out  into  the  river.    The 
British  Government  was  still  demanding  punishment   for   the  deed, 
but  the  Dutch  were  showing  no  intention  of  doing  anything  about  it. 
The  "Bush  Negroes"  have  no  color-line,  but  treat  clothed  blacks 
just  as  they  do  white  men  or  Indians,  and  do  not  hesitate  to  make 
slaves  of  French  convicts  who  fall  into  their  hands.     Not  only  do 
they  pay  no  taxes  or  dues  of  any  kind  to  the  government,  but  the 
latter,  ever  afraid  of  an  outbreak  among  them,  pays  them  annual 
tribute.     Once  or  twice  a  year  the  "gran  man"  of  each  tribe  comes 
to  town  in  frock-coat  and  silk  hat,  but  bare  feet,  wearing  a  great 
bronze  coat-of-arms  of  Holland  across  his  chest  and  followed  by  an 
obsequious   valet,   to   call   upon  the  governor  and    receive   greetings 


ROAMING  THE  THREE  GLTA::AS  591 

from  Queen  Wilhelmina,  a  letter  renewing  tlie  tucaty  between  his 
tribe  and  the  Dutch,  and  a  small  sum  of  money  or  some  trinkets  to 
distribute  among  his  tribesmen.  Of  late  years  the  "Bush  Negroes" 
have  been  required  to  wear  clothing  when  they  enter  the  capital,  but 
they  interpret  this  demand  not  into  shirts  and  trousers,  but  into  a 
multicolored,  silky  strip  of  cloth  which  they  drape  about  their  naked 
bodies  in  an  ornamental  rather  than  concealing  manner.  A  bit  of 
contact  with  urban  civilization  makes  them  crafty.  One  day  in  Para- 
maribo I  drifted  down  to  the  river  where,  among  lumber  piles,  a  whole 
colony  of  "Bush  Negroes"  was  stopping  while  they  exchanged  the 
wood  they  had  brought  for  useless  finery.  I  offered  a  Dutch  quarter 
to  one  of  them  in  fancy  drapery  to  pose  before  my  kodak.  He  only 
agreed  on  condition  that  he  could  be  taken  with  one  hand  on  a  camp 
chair,  evidently  for  the  same  reason  that  some  of  our  countrymen 
prefer  backgrounds  of  skyscrapers,  since  he  had  certainly  never 
owned,  and  probably  never  sat  in  a  chair  in  his  life.  No  sooner  was 
I  done  with  him  than  another  man,  better  built  and  more  joyfully 
dressed,  stepped  out,  offering  to  pose  for  a  similar  sum.  Then  a  still 
more  gorgeous  one  put  in  an  appearance,  and  the  procession  evi- 
dently would  have  continued  indefinitely,  as  nicely  graded  as  the 
characters  in  a  Broadway  musical  comedy  up  to  the  climax  of  spot- 
lighted heroine,  had  I  not  professed  myself  out  of  Dutch  quarters. 

"Bush  Negroes"  form  new  words  onomatopoetically.  Thus,  when 
the  first  motor-boat  approached  their  retreat,  one  of  them,  putting  a 
hand  behind  his  acute  ear,  said,  "Hah !  Packapacka  walkee  disee  way," 
and  "packapackas"  they  have  been  ever  since.  Their  language  is  the 
"taki-taki"  of  all  the  uneducated  natives  of  Dutch  Guiana,  though 
they  use  many  words,  chiefly  African  in  origin,  not  familiar  to  their 
clothes-wearing  brethren.  The  basis  of  "taki-taki"  as  its  name  sug- 
gests, is  English  with  considerable  Dutch  and  traces  of  all  the  languages 
that  have  seeped  over  the  borders  of  the  colony  during  its  long  and 
checkered  history,  all  mixed  together  in  the  same  concoction,  in  keeping 
with  a  childish  intelligence,  and  spoken  with  negro  slovenliness. 
It  was  my  privilege  one  Sunday  to  hear  a  sermon  in  "taki-taki" 
in  one  of  the  w^ooden  churches  of  the  ^Moravians  up  a  coastal  river. 
While  the  congregation  did  not  consist  exactly  of  "Bush  Negroes," 
it  was  of  a  similar  grade  of  intelligence;  and  the  same  mission- 
ary preached  on  alternate  weeks  in  a  village  of  wild  blacks,  using  the 
same  language,  though  not  quite  so  many  Dutch  words.  Canoe-loads 
of  negroes  appeared  from  up  and  down  the  placid  river  soon  after  the 


592  ^^'ORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

bell  had  rung  out  from  the  steeple  of  the  home-made  church,  standing 
out  incongruously  against  the  great  green  forest.  Those  who  lived 
near  were  already  in  their  Sunday  best ;  the  rest  stopped  in  the  bush 
above  or  below  the  church  to  change  their  clothes.  Three  rooms  in 
the  minister's  house  had  been  set  aside  for  that  purpose,  but  they 
prefer  the  outdoor  dressing-rooms.  My  host  and  I  were  the  only 
white  men  in  the  congregation,  and  we  were  led  to  special  benches 
beside  the  pulpit  and  facing  the  rest.  There  were  a  hundred  or 
more  negroes  in  the  church,  almost  all  of  them  jet  black;  the  sexes 
were  separated,  with  the  children  on  the  front  benches.  What  we 
call  Moravians,  but  who  call  themselves  "Briidergemeinte,"  must  be 
married,  and  in  this  case  the  burly,  bearded,  German  missionary  stalked 
in  followed  by  his  cadaverous,  Quaker-looking  wife  wearing  the  ap- 
proved sour  expression  of  many  Protestants  engaged  in  the  business 
of  saving  heathen  souls.  She  was  wearing  drab  black  and  a  little 
monkey-like  cap,  and  took  her  place  on  a  platform  in  front  of  the 
female  half  of  the  church,  where  she  remained  absolutely  motionless 
throughout  the  long  service.  A  black  Dutchman,  who  taught  a  class 
of  negro  children  in  the  mission  school  during  the  week,  tortured  a  little 
melodeon  from  time  to  time.  Greater  solemnity  could  not  be  imag- 
ined; the  place  was  full  of  sanctimonious,  breathless  negroes  with 
pillar-of-the-church  expressions— who,  according  to  my  companion, 
were  past  masters  at  stealing  anything  they  could  lay  their  hands  on  out- 
side it.  The  dialect  used  in  the  sermon  has  been  reduced  to  writing  by 
the  A'loravians,  which  is  the  reason  a  printed  page  of  the  "taki-taki'' 
Testament  or  the  "Singi-boekoe,"  does  not  look  more  familiar  to  those 
of  us  whose  native  tongue  is  its  basis.  For,  being  Germans,  the  transla- 
tors have  given  German  or  Dutch  values  to  the  letters,  so  that  while 
the  word  "switi"  might  not  be  quickly  intelligible  to  us,  we  would 
have  no  difficulty  in  understanding  it  as  "sweety."  "Joe,"  "wi," 
"bekasi,"  and  "Loekoe !"  are  simply  Dutch-German  ways  of  spellmg 
"you,"  "we,"  "becausee,"  and  "Looky"  or  "Look  ye!"  "Hij  wan  bigi 
man,"  as  it  appears  in  the  "taki-taki"  Bible,  would  be  readily  recog- 
nizable if  written  "He  one  bigee  man."  "Mama"  has  the  same  meaning 
as  in  all  languages,  but  "father"  is  "tata,"  as  among  the  Indians  of 
the  Andes.  "Pikien"  for  "child"  may  have  come  from  the  African 
"piccaninny,"  from  the  Spanish  pequcno  or  the  Portuguese  pcqucno. 
"Masra  Gado"  was  "Lord  God,"  the  "a"  always  retaining  the  broad 
open-mouthed  West  Indian  form.  Both  in  vocabulary  and  grammar 
"taki-taki"  shows  the  most  primitive,  childlike  minds  at  work  and  the 


ROAMING  THE  THREE  GUIAXAS  593 

spoken  language  suggests  nothing  so  much  as  a  group  of  negro  chil- 
dren on  a  Southern  plantation  trying  to  express  themselves  in  the 
language  of  their  elders.  Thus  the  word  "switi"  means  "good"  in 
any  of  its  forms, — in  taste,  quality,  condition,  or  character;  "Hij 
maki  wi"  may  mean  anything  from  "He  makes  us"  to  "He  would 
have  made  us."  The  text  that  day  was  St.  Luke,  Chapter  XVI, 
Verse  25 : 

Ma  Granman  Abraham  taki  gi  hem  taki :  Mcmbre,  mi  pikien,  taki, 
joe  ben  habi  joe  boen  liebi  datem,  di  joe  ben  de  na  grontapo,  ma  Lazarus 
ben  habi  wan  ogri  liebi:     We,  now  hem  kisi  troostoe,  ma  joe  de  pina. 

Much  of  the  sermon  I  did  not  understand  at  all,  or  at  most  caught 
crudely  the  gist  of  it,  as  the  resonant  Teutonic  voice  boomed  it  forth 
in  the  lingua  franca  of  the  colony.  But  every  now  and  then  there 
rang  forth  a  perfectly  plain  sentence  in  child-English,  as  when  fre- 
quently the  burly  German  took  a  step  forward  and,  shaking  his 
finger  in  the  faces  of  his  breathless  congregation,  cried  out  above 
the  general  jumble  of  sounds,  "Yd  no  mussy  do  datty!" — which  is 
good  advice  in  any  language. 

A  Dutch  coastal  steamer  carried  me  in  a  night  from  Paramaribo 
to  the  second  town  of  the  colony,  Nickerie,  a  hamlet  of  a  thousand  or 
more  inhabitants  just  across  the  Corentyne  River  from  British  Guiana. 
It  was  a  straggling  line  of  coy  white  houses  and  a  church  spire,  all 
of  wood,  stretching  roomily  along  the  river  bank  amid  cocoanut  and 
royal  palms  and  a  wealth  of  tropical  greenery,  not  to  mention  humid- 
ity. Its  sanded  streets  and  roads  were  all  raised,  like  dikes,  for  the 
coastal  lands  of  both  Dutch  and  British  Guiana  are  below  high-tide 
level,  and  must  be  empoldered,  as  in  Holland,  with  a  "back  dam" 
also  in  most  cases  to  keep  out  the  rain-water  from  the  interior.  I 
strolled  several  miles  up  the  river,  past  great  swamps  that  make 
the  region  the  paradise  of  mosquitoes  and  malaria,  to  say  nothing  of 
elephantiasis,  to  "Waterloo," — not  a  battlefield,  but  a  great  sugar 
estate  run  by  Englishmen.  The  first  cutting — that  of  July — had 
begun,  the  principal  one  coming  in  September.  The  great  cane-fields 
were  being  burned  over,  whether  for  snakes  or  merely  to  clear  out 
the  massed  leaves  was  not  apparent,  clouds  of  leaden  heavy  smoke 
rising  here  and  there  across  the  immense  light-green  stretches  flooded 
with  sunshine  and  surmounted  by  a  few  lofty  royal  palms.  Next 
negroes  and  Hindus  attack  the  crop  with  "cudasses,"  tossing  the  canes 
in  heaped-up  rows  along  the  edges  of  the  canals,  where  they  were 


594  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

loaded  into  barges  drawn  by  mules  and  borne  away  toward  the  red 
stacks  of  sugar-mills  looming  somewhat  hazily  out  of  the  blue  and 
humid  air.  The  transportation  of  both  cane  and  the  finished  sugar 
is  by  these  iron  barges  along  the  irrigation  canals — of  water  as  noi- 
some as  that  before  Benares.  A  little  old  English  windjammer  had 
come  up  the  river  to  load  sugar  and  to  contrast  with  the  Oriental  aspect 
of  the  scene.  A  few  English  overseers  rode  big  mules  along  the  diked 
tow-paths,  one  of  whom  complained  that  they  got  less  pay  and  fewer 
advantages  here  than  over  the  border  under  their  own  flag.  By 
noon  I  had  returned  to  Nickerie,  where  I  indulged  in  a  shower-bath 
and  a  goodly  dose  of  quinine,  and  retired  from  active  life  until  the 
sun  had  lost  some  of  its  homicidal  tendency;  then  strolled  down  the 
river  to  a  cacao  and  cocoanut  estate.  Here  a  white  deporte  who  had 
escaped  from  French  Guiana  was  lugging  a  burden  along  the  road 
with  other  outcasts.  The  Dutch,  I  recalled,  rather  than  lower  the 
standing  of  their  race  among  their  colored  colonists,  send  home  to 
Holland  any  white  man  sentenced  to  prison  by  the  courts  of  Surinam. 
Under  the  cocoanut-trees  sounded  singsong  Hindustani ;  old  Hindu 
fakirs  squatted  beside  reed-and-grass  huts.  A  canal,  with  a  gate  to 
shut  out  the  sea-water  at  high  tide,  stretched  inland  as  far  as  the 
eye  could  see,  a  path  on  either  side  and  frequent  humped  foot-bridges 
across  it.  I  passed  an  open-air  school  in  which  a  mulatto  was  teaching 
Dutch  to  the  children  of  the  plantation — with  little  effect,  evidently, 
for  they  reverted  to  their  native  tongues  or  to  "taki-taki"  the  instant 
they  were  dismissed.  The  distant  sound  of  the  half-mournful  gama- 
long  floating  by  on  the  languid  evening  breeze  showed  that  a  group  of 
Javanese  had  already  begun  their  night's  entertainment.  People  were 
fishing  in  the  slime  of  the  canals,  and  Hindus  were  bathing  in  them, 
no  doubt  finding  them  an  excellent  substitute  for  their  holy  Ganges. 
All  in  all,  Surinam  had  proved  the  quaintest  and  most  hospitable  of  all 
the  Guianas,  capable  of  producing  a  hundred  fold  what  it  does  now. 
The  launch  Ella  finally  left  for  Springlands,  across  the  boundary, 
with  nineteen  persons,  among  whom  I  was  the  only  white  one,  all  packed 
in  the  forward  cubby-hole  with  the  steersman.  For  hours  we  plowed 
the  yellow  waters  of  the  great  mouth  of  the  Corentyne,  the  dead-flat 
wooded  shore  frequently  disappearing  in  island-like  patches  in  the 
mirage  of  distance.  Then  some  stacks  and  a  cluster  of  buildings 
among  trees  grew  toward  us,  and  we  anchored  off  a  wooden  wharf 
on  which  we  were  eventually  landed  in  a  clumsy  rowboat.  There 
we  found  ourselves  inclosed  in  a  kind  of  wooden  cage,  where  a  black 


ROAMING  THE  THREE  GUIANAS  595 

policeman,  with  a  pompous  British  air,  and  a  pimply  Chinese  youth  went 
through  some  formality  about  our  names  and  previous  condition  of 
servitude,  after  which  an  Englishman  eventually  appeared,  merely 
glancing  at  my  modest  bag,  but  carefully  studying  my  passport — the 
only  time  I  was  ever  asked  to  show  a  document  I  had  spent  much 
time  and  some  money  to  get  and  have  vised  in  Para  for  the  three 
Guianas.  Had  any  of  the  dozen  delays  been  avoided,  I  should  still 
have  had  plenty  of  time  to  catch  the  daily  autobus  westward  along 
the  coast;  as  it  was,  it  still  seemed  possible.  I  coaxed  a  coolie  boy 
under  my  bag  and  sped  away,  only  to  find  that  the  bus  no  longer 
came  to  Springlands,  but  stopped  four  miles  off,  because  the  sea  had 
washed  out  a  strip  of  highway.  A  yellow  negro  with  an  imitation 
automobile  called  the  "Star"  offered  to  carry  me  to  it  for  a  small 
fortune,  and  in  this  we  rattled  out  along  a  red  country  road,  dodging 
innumerable  negroes  and  Hindus,  and  producing  an  uproar  like 
a  locomotive  off  the  track  but  still  running  at  top  speed — to  come  at 
last  to  the  break  in  the  road  just  in  time  to  see  the  bus  on  the  other 
side  of  it  start  twenty  minutes  ahead  of  its  schedule. 

To  increase  my  geniality,  I  then  discovered  that  the  day  was  Sat- 
urday and  that,  being  on  British  soil,  there  would  be  no  bus  on  Sunday. 
Profanity  being  inadequate  to  the  occasion,  there  was  nothing  to  do  but 
to  get  back  into  the  automatic  noise  and  return  to  town.  This  con- 
sisted mainly  of  an  immense  sugar  estate  called  "Skeldon";  but  the 
very  British  manager  looked  at  me  as  at  some  curious  and  hitherto 
unknown  species  of  fauna  when  I  suggested  that  I  spend  the  fort}- 
eight  hours  on  my  hands  in  getting  in  touch  with  the  sugar  industry. 
Saturday  afternoon  market  was  in  full  swing,  stretching  for  miles 
along  the  public  highway  in  the  blazing  sunshine,  for  buying  and 
selling  is  the  chief  sport  of  the  laboring  classes  of  the  sugar  estates 
on  their  weekly  pay-day  and  half  holiday.  In  the  throng  were  noisy, 
impudent  negroes  of  all  tints  in  hectic  garments,  but  they  were  over- 
whelmed by  a  flood  of  as  many  queer  Plindu  types,  turbans,  and 
female  jewelry  as  could  be  found  in  the  streets  of  Calcutta,  with  darker, 
tawnier  Madrassee  coolies  as  a  sort  of  link  between  the  two  races. 
The  latter  were  half -wild  looking  creatures,  speaking  Tamil,  and 
were  said  to  work  better  than  the  other  Hindus,  but  to  be  spenders 
and  gamblers,  instead  of  penny-squeezers.  Many  of  the  goods  dis- 
played, almost  entirely  of  foodstuffs,  were  the  same  as  those  in  the 
markets  of  India,  from  coiled  sweetmeats  to  curries.  The  coolies 
lived  in  clusters  of  one-story  barracks,  the  negroes  generally  in  make- 


596  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

shift  wooden  shacks,  all  joined  by  a  foot-bridge  over  the  flanking  irri- 
gation ditches  to  the  highway  and  the  huge  mills,  the  stacks  of  which 
already  seemed  eagerly  waiting  to  resume  their  labors  on  Monday 
morning. 

An  Anglicized  Portuguese  shopkeeper  near  "Skeldon"  had  a  hotel 
at  "64."  to  which  his  servant  drove  me  in  a  buggy,  and  then  by  auto- 
mobile, along  a  reddish  road  of  hard  earth  raised  above  the  general 
level  of  the  country.  But  I  was  the  only  guest  in  a  long  time,  and  the 
mammy-like  old  negress  came  up  to  inquire  "what  de  gen'leman  ac- 
customed to  eat"  before  she  went  away  to  catch  and  boil  it.  Moreover, 
I  am  not  a  good  waiter,  and  with  two  days  on  my  hands  I  decided  to 
walk  on  next  morning,  perhaps  to  New  Amsterdam,  forty  miles 
away.  There  was  an  excellent  country  road  all  day  long  through  low- 
lands densely  populated  by  East  Indians  and  negroes  in  huts  and  houses 
always  on  stilts.  Generally  these  had  shingled  walls  and  sheet-iron 
roofs,  though  now  and  then  one  saw  a  thatched  mud  hut  that  seemed 
to  have  been  transported  bodily  from  Iberian  South  America,  and  some- 
times a  shingle-sided  house  with  a  thatched  roof,  looking  like  a  well- 
dressed  man  still  wearing  his  old  and  shaggy  winter  cap.  In  places  the 
villages  were  almost  continuous,  with  bright  red  wooden  police-stations 
every  few  miles  occupied  by  lounging  but  fleckless  negro  policemen. 
Stone  or  cement  mile-posts  recorded  my  progress,  and  two  telegraph 
wires  constantly  dogged  my  footsteps.  Goats  and  donkeys  were  nearly 
as  numerous  as  negroes  and  coolies.  The  highway  itself  was  often 
crowded  with  traffic, — donkey-carts,  many  bicycles,  countless  people 
on  foot,  some  automobiles.  In  all  my  tramping  in  South  America 
I  had  almost  never  before  had  to  dodge  these  curses  of  the  pedestrian. 
One  might  have  fancied  oneself  in  the  most  populous  parts  of  Europe. 
The  latest  census  credited  British  Guiana  with  304,089  inhabitants ; 
it  was  plain  to  see  why  there  were  few  left  for  the  ninety  per  cent, 
of  the  colony  back  of  this  crowded  coastal  fringe.  For  all  its  British 
nationality,  the  vast  majority  of  the  country  is  not  developed  even  as 
much  as  are  such  shiftless  republics  as  Honduras,  where  at  least  one 
can  telegraph  anywhere. 

Plainly,  too,  white  men  are  not  accustomed  to  tramp  the  roads  of 
British  Guiana.  There  was  constant  staring,  with  now  and  then  an 
impudent  remark  from  some  negro,  but  for  the  most  part  there  were 
unfailingly  polite  greetings.  Yet  I  was  handicapped  by  my  color,  which, 
as  in  all  South  America — with  a  few  exceptions,  such  as  Buenos 
Aires— marked  me  at  a  glance  as  of  a  race  apart.     Not  only  was  I 


ROAMING  THE  THREE  GUIANAS  597 

obliged  to  pay  higher  to  keep  from  lodging  in  negro  quarters  or  among 
Hindus,  but  silence  fell  on  almost  every  group  I  approached,  as  if 
they  feared  I  might  hear  their  real  thoughts.  HI  asked  a  question,  I 
was  instantly  looked  upon  with  such  suspicion  as  might  meet  a  detec- 
tive in  a  dive  of  criminals.  Not  that  I  would  change  my  color;  but 
it  would  certainly  have  been  an  advantage  to  be  able  to  disguise  myself 
as  a  Hindu  fakir  or  an  African  chief  as  easily  as  it  is  done  in  popular 
novels  or  the  legends  of  famous  travelers. 

Worst  of  all,  it  was  Sunday!  I  was  "much  humbugged"  by  the 
deep-blue  tint  of  that  day  of  the  week  in  the  stern  Anglo-Saxon 
civilization  I  had  almost  forgotten,  for  the  laws  of  British  Guiana 
require  shops  of  every  description  to  remain  hermetically  sealed  from 
eleven  o'clock  on  Saturday  evening  to  Monday  morning.  They  were  in- 
numerable, the  larger  ones  kept  by  Portuguese  and  Chinamen,  as  the  un- 
failing name  of  the  proprietor  above  the  doors  admitted,  the  smaller 
and  more  slatternly  ones  by  negroes,  and  a  few  by  Hindus.  Plenty 
of  "Licensed  Retail  Spirit  Shops"  announced  themselves,  yet  I  be- 
came ever  more  cotton-mouthed  with  thirst,  for  though  the  great 
mud  fiats  on  either  side  of  the  dike-like  road  were  often  lakes,  it 
would  probably  have  meant  quick  death  to  drink  from  them.  The 
natives  all  drink  rain-water,  every  house  or  hut  of  whatever  size 
or  material  catching  it  ofi  the  roof  in  barrels  or  tanks ;  but  these  had 
a  scent  as  of  veritable  Hindu  uncleanliness.  Finally  I  stirred  up  a 
negro  lolling  in  a  hut  to  break  the  Sabbath  to  the  extent  of  climbing  a 
cocoanut-tree,  and  drank  three  of  the  green  nuts  dry  at  a  draught. 
The  sun  blazed  maliciously,  but  there  was  a  constant  breeze  from  oft* 
the  sea,  which  most  of  the  day  was  so  close  at  hand  that  I  could  hear 
the  roar  of  the  breakers  and  now  and  then  catch  a  glimpse  of  it. 

Hunger,  too,  soon  discovered  that  it  was  Sunday.  When  I  could 
endure  it  no  longer  I  attacked  the  door  of  a  closed  shop  and  aroused 
the  offspring  of  a  Portuguese  father  and  a  negro  mother,  only  to  get 
an  obdurate,  "  'Gainst  de  law,  sah,  to  sell  anything  on  de  Sabbath." 

"Not  against  the  law  to  starve  to  death  though,  eh?"  I  retorted, 
which  extraordinary  burst  of  wit  so  took  his  fancy  that  he  exploded 
into  a  cackling  laugh  with,  "Ah.  no,  indeed,  sah,  dat's  de  fac',"  and 
finally  became  so  mollified  as  to  take  me  to  dinner  as  an  invited  guest. 
It  seems  it  is  still  permitted  to  have  guests  to  dinner  on  Sunday.  The 
meal  we  sat  down  to  in  his  stilt-legged  house  across  the  way  consisted 
of  nothing  but  a  large  plate  of  boiled  rice  with  a  bit  of  fat  pork  in 
it,  topped  by  a  cup  of  hot  goat's  milk,  but  King  George's  dinner  that 


598  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

day  did  not  compare  with  it.  My  host  would  not  eat  with  me,  evi- 
dently for  the  same  polite  reason  that  had  kept  Langrey  standing, 
though  he  asserted  he  could  not  eat  hot  food  "because  my  tooth  hum- 
bug me  too  much."  Paucity  of  vocabulary  among  not  only  the  negroes 
but  many  of  the  whites  born  in  the  colony  is  astonishing  and  easily 
leads  to  errors.  "Jes'  now,"  for  instance,  may  mean  at  once,  an  hour 
ago,  or  a  day  hence.  "Humbug"  serves  for  anything  whatever  of  a 
detrimental  character.  "Don'  you  let  'nybody  make  you  a  fool" 
is  the  usual  form  of  that  verb  as  we  use  it.  The  first  question  of  a 
British  Guiana  negro  to  any  stranger  to  whom  he  dares  put  one 
is  almost  certain  to  be  "Your  title,  please,  sah?"  meaning,  "What  is 
your  name?"  and  closely  corresponding  to  the  "Su  gracia  de  usted?" 
of  rural  Spanish-America,  The  negro  is  the  most  imitative  of  human 
beings.  In  Brazil  he  has  all  the  gestures  and  excitability  of  the  Latin; 
here  he  talks  with  the  motionless,  solemn  demeanor  of  the  Anglo- 
Saxon.  Before  I  left,  my  host  told  me  that  many  detectives  were 
sent  out  to  catch  shopkeepers  breaking  the  closing  law,  and  that,  never 
having  seen  a  white  man  walking  the  road  before,  he  was  still  not 
sure  I  was  not  one  of  them.  "An'  de  fine  ain't  a  gill  nor  a  half-bit 
either,"  he  added,  in  the  peculiarly  squeaky  voice  of  his  mongrel  race. 
The  country  grew  a  trifle  wilder,  with  only  negroes  in  the  scattered 
huts,  and  swamps  often  stretching  away  on  either  side,  full  of  tough 
sedge-grass  whispering  hoarsely  together  in  the  sea  breeze.  From 
mid-afternoon  on  the  land  was  largely  flooded.  Rice-fields  began  on 
the  landward  side  of  the  road,  with  a  few  grazing  cattle  on  the 
seaside,  and  there  were  long  rectangular  plots  of  paddy  in  all  stages 
from  sprouting  to  nearly  ripe.  Coolies,  wdio  lived  by  the  hundreds 
in  huts  bunched  together  on  estates  or  on  their  own  small  farms,  were 
pottering  about  in  them.  Some  were  freemen  and  others  estate 
workmen  who  had  been  given  a  patch  of  ground  on  which  to  grow  their 
own  rice  during  their  spare  time.  This  practice  is  said  to  leave  many 
plantations  without  sufficient  laborers  on  Monday  and  even  Tuesday, 
for  the  coolies,  feigning  sickness,  stay  home  to  rest  up  from  their  more 
earnest  Sunday  labor  for  themselves.  Not  being  Christians,  they 
are  granted  a  certain  immunity  in  Sabbath-breaking.  Coolies,  carry- 
ing along  the  road  bundles  of  long,  green  rice  pulled  up  by  the  roots 
for  transplanting,  greeted  me  with,  "Salaam,  sahib !"  though  "Mahnin', 
sah!"  was  more  likely  to  be  that  of  the  Hindu  youths  born  in  the 
colony,  their  glossy  hair  and  complexions  as  startlingly  out  of  place 
in  European  garb  as  fluent  English  of  West  Indian  accent  and  vocabu- 


ROAMING  THE  THREE  GUIANAS  599 

lary  was  on  their  lips.  Jvcsidcnts  of  judgment  seem  to  agree  that 
the  imported  coolie  is  inferior  to  the  Creole. 

I  had  walked  twenty-five  miles  when  I  reached  the  immense  sugar 
estate  of  "Port  Mourant."  Besides  its  great  mill  with  three  stacks, 
there  were  the  bungalow  mansion  of  the  manager,  the  somewhat  less 
imposing  bungalows  of  the  assistant  manager  and  the  engineer,  a  big 
hospital  on  legs,  the  overseers'  barracks,  several  houses  for  lesser 
married  employees,  and  a  plethora  of  offices  and  smaller  buildings 
scattered  away  through  lawn  and  trees.  Here,  I  suddenly  recalled, 
I  had  a  letter  of  introduction  to  the  chief  chemist,  said  to  be  a  fellow- 
countryman,  and  I  turned  into  the  inclosure.  His  name  was  Bird, 
and  he  was  rightly  named.  When  I  had  sent  the  letter  up  to  his  residence 
on  stilts  and  been  allowed  to  stand  waiting  on  the  cement  floor  below 
stairs  about  half  an  hour,  like  any  negro,  a  cadaverous  individual 
came  hobbling  down.  Handing  me  back  my  letter,  a  look  of  terror 
burst  forth  on  his  sour  face  when  I  hinted  a  desire  to  see  a  bit  of  the 
life  on  a  sugar  plantation,  as  if  the  terrible  bourgeois  fate  of  losing 
his  job  were  already  grasping  him  by  the  throat. 

"I  can't  do  a  thing  for  you !"  he  cried  hastily,  ignoring  the  fact 
that  I  had  not  asked  him  to  do  anything,  and  he  quickly  retreated.  I 
was  delighted  to  learn  later  that  he  was  only  a  surcharged  American 
after  all. 

Evidently  there  was  some  horrible  mystery  connected  with  the 
sugar  plantations  of  British  Guiana ;  perhaps  it  was  some  species  of 
peonage.  It  was  plainly  my  duty  to  find  the  cause  of  this  overwhelming 
fear  of  strangers.  I  stalked  across  to  the  big  two-story  mansion  on 
stilts  in  which  the  manager  lived.  After  a  second  inspection  the  negro 
maid  actually  let  me  in,  permitting  me  to  take  the  stool  nearest  the 
door,  and  for  the  next  half  hour — the  manager  being  in  his  "bawth" — 
contriving  to  pass  frequently  up  or  down  the  stairway  at  the  back 
of  the  immense  and  well- furnished  drawing-room  to  see  that  I  did 
not  get  away  with  the  piano  or  any  of  the  popular  novels.  Some 
pretty  little  tow-headed  children  passed  from  the  black  nurse  to  the 
very  English  governess  without  being  permitted  to  become  acquainted, 
and  at  last  the  manager  himself  appeared.  I  had  long  known  that 
the  most  painful  experience  in  life  is  to  introduce  oneself  to  an  Eng- 
lishman, but  I  hold  such  occasional  self-flagellation  to  be  good  for 
the  soul.  He  was  typical  of  the  important,  "well-bred"  Britisher — 
though  evidently  Irish — and  he  descended  upon  me  with  the  eat-'em- 
alive  air  of  an  attacking  bulldog.     But  as  I  am  least  likely  to  run  when 


6oo  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

most  expected  to,  I  sat  tight.  Unlike  many  of  our  own  countrymen  in 
positions  of  importance,  or  what  they  and  the  world  consider  such,  the 
Britisher  never  seems  to  dare  to  risk  loss  of  authority  by  even  momen- 
tarily descending  to  human  ways  until  he  is  sure  he  is  not  dealing  with  an 
"inferior."  The  manager  was  not  clear  on  that  point  in  this  case,  but 
gradually  it  dawned  upon  him  that  he  could  neither  shoot  me  on  the 
spot  nor  have  me  dragged  out,  and  once  he  had  recovered  from  the 
dreadful  feeling  of  having  no  precedent  to  go  by,  he  began  to  act 
more  like  the  human  being  and  the  tolerably  good  fellow  he  undoubt- 
edly was  way  down  underneath  his  job  and  his  generations  of  steeping 
in  caste  rules.  His  voice  diminished  from  that  of  an  army  officer 
ordering  the  immediate  execution  of  a  traitor  to  a  tone  befitting  a 
drawing-room,  and  he  finally  sat  down,  though  explaining  that  "under 
no  circumstances"  could  he  permit  anyone  to  see  the  estate  without 
an  order  from  the  owners — one  of  the  principal  business  houses  in 
the  colony.  Later,  when  I  applied  to  them  in  town,  they  assured  me 
that  they  never  gave  such  orders,  but  left  the  matter  entirely  to  the 
discretion  of  the  managers  on  the  estates — which  was  evidently  the 
British  form  of  "passing  the  buck"  and  pretending  to  be  cordial  while 
concealing  that  dreadful  secret  of   Guianese  sugar  estates. 

I  rose  to  say  that  I  would  walk  on  to  Berbice — and  sleep  in  a  ditch 
along  the  way,  I  might  have  added,  for  it  was  fifteen  miles  off  and  the 
sun  was  near  setting — when  a  really  human  idea  came  to  him.  Sum- 
moning the  head  overseer,  he  told  him  to  have  the  spare  bed  in  the 
overseers'  barracks  arranged  for  me,  adding  a  more  than  plain  hint 
that  I  be  allowed  to  see  nothing  on  the  estate  and  that  I  be  sped  on  my 
way  as  soon  as  possible  in  the  morning.  I  was  on  the  point  of  sug- 
gesting that  I  would  not  object  to  being  blindfolded,  when  the  man- 
ager's wife  appeared  in  gorgeous  costume,  followed  by  the  "tea  things," 
and,  there  being  no  way  out  of  it,  I  was  asked  to  tea.  This  was  a 
great  advance,  but  I  took  far  higher  rank  later,  reaching  almost  the 
heights  of  a  respectable  person,  when  the  manager  remarked  to  the 
head  overseer  in  the  voice  of  a  judge  asking  a  lawyer  who  has  special- 
ized in  that  particular  subject,  "By  Jove,  I  wonder  if  it  isn't  late 
enough  for  the  first  swizzle?"  The  head  overseer  took  the  weighty 
question  under  consideration  and  at  length  decided  that  there  was  a 
precedent  somewhere  in  British  colonial  history  for  starting  the  custo- 
mary evening  entertainment  at  that  hour,  whereupon  a  Hindu  butler 
in  gleaming  white  appeared  with  a  yellowish  mixture  of  whiskey 
base,  which  he  whirled  into  a  foam  with  a  "swizzle-stick"  made  ap- 


ROAMING  THE  THREE  GUIAXAS  6oi 

parently  of  the  root  and  stem  of  a  small  bush,  the  latter  rolled  rapidly 
between  the  hands,  and  served  us  in  order  of  rank.  This  universal 
appetizer  and  eye-opener  of  British  Guiana  being  over,  the  head 
overseer  led  the  way  to  a  long  rambling  building  on  legs,  where  a 
score  of  white  Britishers,  young  or  at  most  in  early  middle  age,  were 
already  between  merry  and  maudlin  from  the  same  cause. 

Here  we  "swizzled"  several  times  more,  and  then  went  in  a  body  to 
a  dining-room  on  the  ground  floor  under  the  manager's  house,  where 
fourteen  of  us  sat  down  to  dinner  about  a  large  table.  The  deputy 
manager  was  at  the  head  and  the  head  overseer  at  the  foot ;  the  rules 
of  caste,  of  course,  did  not  make  it  possible  for  them  to  eat  with  the 
manager.  It  was  not  a  luxurious  meal,  though  plentiful  and  most 
formal.  During  the  course  of  it  a  ledger  in  which  the  manager,  or 
his  secretary,  had  written  out  each  man's  orders  for  the  next  day 
passed  from  hand  to  hand.  To  an  American,  the  rather  faint  and 
easily  satisfied  ambitions  of  these  not  particularly  prepossessing  young 
men  was  striking.  They  gave  an  impression  of  intellects  of  modest 
horse-power  rarely  speeded  up  into  high  gear,  with  slight  interests 
or  knowledge  outside  their  routine  work  of  bossing  coolies  in  the 
fields,  in  which  each  had  his  particular  task  or  section,  without  op- 
portunity, or  apparently  desire,  for  personal  initiative.  Some  of 
them  might,  indeed,  almost  have  been  suspected  of  light-mindedness, 
except  on  the  one  point  of  keeping  up  the  good  old  English  forms, 
prejudices,  and  social  superstitions.  Nearly  all  of  them  had  come 
out  on  three-year  contracts.  If  they  remained  five  years,  they  got  a 
six  months'  trip  home — at  the  company's  expense  if  and  when  they  re- 
turned ;  after  ten  years  as  overseers  the  more  clean-cut  ones  might  be- 
come head  overseers,  and  years  later,  deputy  manager.  Then,  if  the 
latter  made  no  slips  on  the  glabrous  British  social  ladder,  he  might 
finally,  in  twenty  or  twenty-five  years,  work  himself  up  into  managerial 
timber,  a  rank  at  which  there  are  few  openings  compared  with  the 
number  who  come  out  as  overseers.  The  fixed  rules  of  behavior 
were  surprisingly  paradoxical.  The  overseer  might,  and  it  was  tacitly 
implied  that  he  commonly  did,  "keep"  a  native  woman — Hindus  seemed 
to  be  preferred — without  jeopardizing  his  ascent,  so  long  as  he  made 
no  public  display  of  the  fact;  but  he  must  not,  of  course,  be  without 
a  dinner  jacket  and  evening  dress,  or  ride  second-class,  or  do  any  of 
those  other  things  which  a  Britisher  of  his  class  "simply  does  n't  do, 
don't  you  know."  Yet  this  distant  and  uncertain  goal  seemed  quite 
sufficient  incentive  for  these  half-hearted  chaps,  many  of  them  younger 


6o2  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

members  of  "best  families"  and  "public  school"  men,  to  whom  the 
vision  of  perhaps  some  day  becoming  manager  of  an  estate,  dwelling 
in  the  big  bungalow  amid  servants  and  secretaries  and  with  stern 
authority  over  everything  in  his  immediate  vicinity,  seemed  the  nearest 
to  paradise  on  earth  to  which  men  of  their  class  could  aspire.  In 
keeping  with  their  general  point  of  view  was  the  calm  assurance, 
almost  worthy  of  a  Latin- American,  with  which  they  waited  for 
"the  government"  to  win  the  war,  without  ever  dreaming  of  personally 
losing  a  meal  or  missing  a  "swizzle."  Contrasted  with  the  strenuous 
exertions  of  the  young  Germans  I  had  seen  trying  to  get  home  from 
Brazil,  the  manner  of  these  rather  inane  young  gentlemen  toward  a 
conflict  that  was  just  then  going  heavily  against  them,  yet  of  which 
they  seemed  almost  as  supremely  indifferent  and  ignorant  as  of 
geography,  was  astonishing. 

The  overseers  get  up  at  five  o'clock,  meet  for  "coffee"  and  instruc- 
tions from  the  manager,  and  at  seven  ride  off  on  mules  to  their  tasks, 
generally  an  hour  or  two  from  the  plantation  center.  Here  they  spend 
a  couple  of  hours  superintending  coolies,  who  for  the  most  part 
work  by  the  "task,"  and  ride  back  for  tiffin,  or  breakfast,  at  eleven. 
They  are  out  again  at  one  o'clock,  five  days  a  week,  and  home  soon 
after  four,  to  have  tea  and  play  tennis,  or  to  prepare  for  the  coming 
gymkhana,  the  estate  horse-races.  There  was  a  commodious  billiard- 
room  in  the  barracks,  though  apparently  no  showerbath.  No  doubt 
each  man  kept  his  own  private  tub  in  captivity.  All  evening  the  head 
overseer  was  most  formally  obliging,  but  seemed  in  constant  fear  of 
my  contravening  the  manager's  orders  in  some  "cute  Yankee"  manner. 

I  was  awakened  at  dawn  by  the  Hindu  "boy" — who  was  past  forty 
• — bringing  me  "coffee" — which  was  tea  ruined  by  the  addition  of  milk 
and  sugar — and  two  diaphanous  slices  of  bread.  The  autobus  was 
not  due  for  some  hours,  so  I  abandoned  the  contested  territory  as 
soon  as  possible  and  rambled  away  along  the  diked  highway.  There 
was  somewhat  less  travel  than  the  day  before,  but  the  shops  were 
open.  So  cool  and  constant  was  the  sea  breeze  that  I  did  not  have 
occasion  to  take  off  my  coat  during  the  whole  fifteen  miles,  every- 
where flanked  by  canebrake.  Men  in  flowing  robes  or  mere  loin- 
cloths, with  caste  marks  on  their  foreheads,  coolie  women  with  arms 
laden  with  silver  bracelets,  their  thin  and  silky,  though  not  always 
newly  laundered,  draperies  wrapped  gracefully  about  them,  little 
Oriental  temples  standing  out  against  the  flat  horizon,  all  carried  the 
mind  back  to  another  land  halfway  around  the  globe.     There  was  an 


iv.'inoso  womi-n  t.ipiHiit;  niiiiH-r  tree^  alter  ihi-  r.'i'^hi'in  or  tiu-  i'rir  i-.a-it 


-^''  >. 


Javanese  and  East  Indian  women  clearing  up  a  cacao  plantation  in  Dutch  Guiana 


A  ferry  across  the  Surinam  River,  joining  two  sections  of  the  railroad  to  the  interior 


A  Bush  Negro  family  on  its  travels.    Less  than  half  the  dugout  is  shown 


ROAMING  THE  THREE  GUIANAS  603 

amazing  contrast  between  the  lithe,  slender  Hindus  in  their  loose 
garb,  some  of  the  younger  girls  almost  beautiful,  if  one  could  over- 
look their  nose-rings  and  a  certain  hereditary  dread  of  soap,  and  the 
gross,  rowdyish,  tinsel-minded  negresses.  Yet  though  the  East  Indian 
was  once  civilized  and  the  negro  never  has  been,  the  result  is  in  some 
ways  astonishingly  the  same. 

Coolies  were  "plowing"  old  canefields  with  pitchforks,  their  women, 
up  to  their  waists  in  slime  and  water,  were  cleaning  out  trenches  and 
irrigation  ditches  or  turning  up  brush  laid  over  newly  sprouted 
shoots  of  cane.  This  lasted  until  ten  in  the  morning,  when  a  procession 
starting  from  the  fields  merged  together  and  wended  its  way  toward 
the  center  of  the  estate,  the  Hindus  disappearing  in  long  communal, 
barracks-like  structures,  the  negroes  squatting  down  to  breakfast  in 
the  shade  of  their  makeshift  hovels.  The  latter  were  greatly  in  the 
minority,  for  they  are  prone  to  work  a  week  and  loaf  two,  or  go  to 
town  to  squander  their  earnings  in  gay  garments  and  automobile 
rides  at  the  height  of  the  cutting  season,  and  planters  prefer  the  more 
dependable  race.  The  first  laborers  brought  over  after  the  freeing  of 
the  slaves  w-ere  Portuguese  from  the  Madeira  Islands.  Then  came 
the  Chinese,  generally  without  a  repatriation  clause  in  their  contracts, 
so  that  they  gradually  drifted  into  shopkecping,  and  to-day  a  few  of 
them  are  among  the  big  business  men  of  the  colony.  Finally  the  great 
reservoir  of  British  India  was  tapped,  the  coolies,  male  and  female, 
coming  out  at  government  and  plantation  expense,  indentured  for  five 
years  and  entitled  to  free  passage  home  again.  i\Iany  preferred  to 
take  a  premium  and  remain,  some  to  rehire,  some  to  plant  their  own 
plots,  a  few  to  become  men  of  importance,  especially  money-lenders 
with  all  the  popular  traits  of  the  Jew.  There  is  no  question  that  the 
Hindu  coolie  is  better  off  in  British  Guiana  than  he  is  at  home,  and 
that  those  born  here  are  in  a  much  more  favorable  condition;  yet  the 
call  of  the  fatherland  is  strong  in  all  races,  and  many  return,  taking 
with  them  enough  to  live  in  what  to  them  is  comfort.  Considerably 
more  than  half  the  population  of  the  colony  are  East  Indians,  but 
very  recently  all  existing  indentures  were  cancelled,  the  Indian  Gov- 
ernment having  forbidden  the  signing  of  new  ones  some  time  before, 
and  a  scheme  is  now  being  worked  out  for  Hindu  immigration  and 
colonization. 

During  all  my  walk  I  did  not  see  a  white  man,  except  the  sheltered 
ones  at  the  estate.  Many  of  the  higns  along  the  way  were  worth 
reading.     '"Dr.  Moses  Eraser,  Dentist  and  Veterinary  Surgeon"  made 


6o4  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

it  unnecessary  to  ask  the  "doctor's"  color.  All  Sing,  Kandra  Babu, 
and  Percival  Stuart  Brathwaite  kept  shop  side  by  side,  the  importance 
of  their  establishments  decreasing  in  the  order  named.  The  autobus, 
resembling  those  along  New  York's  Riverside  Drive,  passed  me  on 
its  outward  trip;  but  if  this  packing  above  and  below  was  typical, 
I  preferred  to  walk.  Here  were  the  same  silly  caste  rules  as  in  the 
street-cars  of  Chile,  and  though  it  was  infinitely  finer  on  top,  English- 
men had  to  swelter  inside,  because  the  imperiale  was  second-class 
and  therefore  given  over  to  negroes  and  occasional  Hindus.  There 
were  marsh  birds  by  hundreds  along  the  flooded  flatlands,  flocks  of 
pinkish  flamingoes  now  and  then  rising  in  flight.  Before  noon  I 
had  drifted  into  New  Amsterdam,  also  known  by  the  name  of  the 
county  of  which  it  is  the  seat,  Berbice,  second  city  of  British  Guiana 
and  not  much  of  a  city  at  that.  A  chiefly  negro  population,  though 
with  many  Hindus,  completely  swamped  the  rare  whites,  living  in 
entirely  shingled  wooden  bungalows  amid  luxuriant  yards  of  palms 
and  mango-trees. 

From  New  Amsterdam  there  is  a  daily  ferry  and  train  to  George- 
town, sixty  miles  away.  To  take  the  one  across  the  River  Berbice, 
distinctly  wider  than  the  Hudson  at  its  mouth,  in  time  to  catch  the 
other,  meant  early  rising.  For  a  time  there  was  much  bush  along 
the  track,  the  stations  generally  being  mere  stopping-places.  Bananas, 
cassava,  corn,  and  cocoanuts  were  the  chief  products.  Then  came 
Hindu  men  and  women  up  to  their  knees  in  reeking  mud,  which  dis- 
colors their  ragged  nether  garments,  setting  out  rice  plants  or  kneading 
the  soil  about  them.  At  Abary  a  group  of  Americans  had  established 
a  big  rice  plantation  and  begun  to  work  it  by  modern  methods,  but  they 
were  already  in  sad  straits.  The  old-fashioned  coolie  hand-labor  seems 
to  be  the  only  one  offering  sure  returns.  Here  and  there  were  rice- 
fields  that  had  gone  back  to  pasture,  the  light  and  dark  grasses  still 
showing  where  the  paddy-dikes  had  been.  As  we  neared  Georgetown 
the  rice  plantations  of  independent  East  Indians  became  numerous, 
with  oxen  as  well  as  men  and  women  wading  along  in  them,  while  the 
houses  and  sleek  cattle  showed  prosperity,  however  biblical  might 
be  their  methods  of  husbandry. 

The  settled  portion  of  British  Guiana  extends  from  the  west  bank 
of  the  Essequibo  River  to  the  east  bank  of  the  Corentyne,  two  hundred 
miles  distant,  with  a  few  islands  at  the  mouth  of  the  Essequibo  and 
some  ten  miles  up  the  Berbice  and  Demerara  Rivers.  Of  the  hundred 
thousand  acres  under  cultivation — an  area  in  proportion  to  the  entire 


ROAMING  THE  THREE  GUIANAS  605 

colon}  as  is  his  forefinger  to  a  human  being — eighty  per  cent,  is 
l)lanted  in  sugar.  A  century  ago  the  cultivation  of  cotton,  coffee,  and 
cacao  gave  way  to  this,  and  even  alternating  of  crops  is  unknown. 
Year  after  year,  often  for  half  a  century,  sugar-cane  has  been  pro- 
duced on  the  same  ground.  Behind  the  plantations,  which  rarely 
extend  more  than  three  miles  from  the  shore,  the  soil  is  a  kind  of 
peat,  with  here  and  there  an  island  of  sand.  In  front  is  the  seashore 
or  river,  with  its  protection  of  almost  impenetrable  mangrove  roots, 
then  a  dike  with  openings  in  it  for  irrigation  ditches,  the  great  wheel- 
operated  gates  of  which  are  opened  to  let  the  water  run  out  at  low 
tide,  but  closed  against  the  sea  or  river  at  their  height,  for  salt  on 
tlie  land  is  fatal.  Back  of  this  dam  is  the  public  road,  kept  up  at 
tile  expense  of  the  plantation  and,  with  the  two  canals  beside  it,  con- 
stituting a  second  dike.  Here  is  a  mile-wide  strip  of  land  that  is  used 
as  pasture,  for  the  sugar-mill,  the  manager's  house,  overseers'  quarters, 
laborers'  villages,  behind  which,  with  a  third  dike,  a  draining  engine, 
perhaps  a  little  railway,  and  the  "kokers,"  or  sluices  to  let  out  surplus 
water,  are  the  interminable  canefields,  protected  from  the  rainy  season 
Hoods  of  the  higher  and  uncultivated  interior  by  a  "back  dam."  Canals 
are  everywhere  used  for  transportation — as  well  as  irrigation — 
in  iron  punts  drawn  by  mules.  The  secrecy  which  hangs  like  a  pall 
over  all  of  the  estates,  however,  I  never  succeeded  in  penetrating. 
Perhaps  it  was  merely  to  prevent  some  "clever  Yankee"  from  learning 
how  cane  is  turned  into  sugar! 

Nickerie  was  once  washed  away  by  the  sea,  and  Georgetown  is 
saved  from  a  like  fate  by  a  massive  sea-wall.  Down  here  where  one 
must  look  up  at  the  ocean  the  only  way  to  fill  a  hole  is  by  digging 
another,  and  there  can  be  no  real  sewer-system  where  sewage  would 
only  float  back  into  the  city  at  high  tide.  Various  systems  are  used 
for  getting  rid  of  Georgetown's  waste  matter,  none  of  them  entirely 
satisfactory.  Its  water  is  brought  in  from  the  savannahs  by  the 
Lahama  Canal,  but  this  is  yellow  with  vegetable  matter  and  cannot 
be  used  for  cooking,  drinking,  or  even  laundry  purposes.  Every 
building  of  any  importance  has  a  rain-water  tank,  some  larger  than 
those  along  our  railroads,  and  as  there  is  little  dust  or  smoke  in  the 
city,  water  thus  stored  is  clear  and  of  good  taste.  Yet  for  all  her 
natural  handicaps,  Georgetown  is  a  comfortable  and  sightly  city  of 
wide,  well-shaded  streets,  often  with  a  canal  flanked  by  rows  of 
trees  in  the  center,  and  broad  green  lawns  so  inviting  after  years 
of  grassless  Latin-America  that  I  was  tempted  to  sit  on  each  of  them 


6o6  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

in  turn.  From  the  sea-wall  to  the  last  negro  shacks  of  the  town  is  a 
distance  of  some  two  miles,  with  ample  elbow-room  and  light  wooden 
structures  that  make  poor  fire  risks. 

The  city  swarmed  with  hulking,  ragged  negroes  leaning  serenely 
against  the  many  posters  bearing  the  appeal  "Your  King  and  your 
Country  need  you.  Enlist  now !"  In  fact,  it  is  unpleasant,  at  least 
for  a  white  woman,  to  walk  down  Water  Street  among  scores  of 
ragged  black  loafers  who  seem  to  take  pains  to  put  themselves  in 
one's  way.  On  the  other  hand,  there  are  cheap  public  carriages, 
which,  I  suppose,  would  be  the  British  reply  to  such  a  criticism.  With 
plantains  and  eddoes  plentiful,  the  mass  of  negroes  are  of  lazier 
temperament  than  their  ancestors,  the  slaves,  who  were  forced  to 
acquire  the  habit  of  work.  They  have  so  much  power  in  the  colony, 
however,  that  the  man  who  must  live  there  permanently  cannot  keep 
clear  of  them,  and  the  visitor  who  inadvertently  touches  or  even 
threatens  some  impudent  lounger  may  be  ''summoned"  and  fined.  It 
should  be  noted  that  in  British  colonies  it  is  not  so  much  the  color-line 
as  the  caste-line  which  divides  society.  A  man  drops  out  of  the 
highest  class  by  having  African  blood  in  his  veins,  but  so  he  does 
even  when  he  is  pure  white  for  many  other  reasons,  such  as  poverty 
or  violation  of  any  of  the  Enghshman's  punctilios  of  social  etiquette. 
Hindus  are  less  in  evidence  in  the  capital  than  on  plantations ;  Indians 
one  almost  never  sees  there.  Every  possible  mixture  of  white,  negro, 
Chinese,  and  East  Indian  may  be  found  in  the  average  crowd,  however, 
though  as  a  whole  this  has  an  Anglo-Saxon  demeanor.  ]\Iost  of  the 
pure  whites  are  pale  and  thin,  the  women  angular;  even  the  young 
men  are  sallow  from  lack  of  exercise,  manual  labor  being  impossible 
and  the  principal  gathering-place  a  "swizzle"  club.  The  death  rate 
is  decreasing,  but  was  still  more  than  twice  that  of  New  York,  thanks 
partly  to  the  fact  that  even  the  English  doctors  in  many  cases  still 
believed  that  "this  mosquito  theory  is  a  lot  of  bally  Yankee  rot,  don't 
you  know." 

The  white  population,  exclusive  of  the  Portuguese,  who  are  not 
strictly  so,  own  about  three-fourths  of  the  property,  and  the  Portu- 
guese much  of  the  rest.  Besides  Chinese  and  unnaturaHzed  Indians, 
there  are  172,000  Hindus,  nearly  all  of  whom  are  alien  or  property-less 
non-voters.  This  leaves  the  few  negroes  owning  property  as  the  real 
rulers,  to  a  limited  degree,  of  the  colony.  In  financial  matters,  includ- 
ing taxation,  this  is  largely  autonomous.  The  governor  is  sent  out 
from  England  and  is  one  of  eight  appointed  members  of  the  legislative 


ROAMING  THE  THREE  GUIANAS  607 

Court  of  Policy;  but  there  arc  also  eight  elective  members,  and  the 
governor  has  the  deciding  vote  only  in  case  of  a  tie.  Those  who  have 
had  occasion  to  deal  with  it  complain  that  the  government  is  smothered 
in  red  tape.  "If  you  wish  to  address  the  head  of  your  department," 
a  man  certainly  in  a  position  to  know  put  it,  "you  write  a  letter  to 
the  next  man  above  you,  he  adds  a  note  and  sends  it  on  to  the  next, 
and  so  on  up  ten,  or  a  dozen,  or  a  score  of  rungs  of  the  official  ladder, 
and  the  answer  comes  down  again  the  same  way,  so  that  when  you 
get  it  back  you  buy  a  trunk  and  pack  the  stuff  away  and  save  it  to 
read  during  your  vacation. 

But  there  are  excellences  in  British  government  which  offset  some 
of  its  precedent-  and  caste-loving  stupidities.  I  went  one  day  with 
the  deputy  head  of  the  Department  of  Lands  and  JNIines,  who  is  also 
"Protector  of  the  Indians,"  to  the  recently  established  "Aboriginal 
Indian  Depot."  The  aborigines  are  a  simple,  good-natured  people 
whose  chief  fault  is  a  liking  for  rum,  and  not  only  do  none  of  them 
live  in  town,  but  they  cannot  cope  with  urban  dangers  during  their 
rare  visits  there.  Principally  by  the  use  of  liquor,  laws  to  the  contrary 
notwithstanding,  the  riffraff  of  Georgetown  made  it  their  business 
to  rob  the  Indian  men  and  lead  the  Indian  women  astray  whenever 
they  came  to  town;  now  the  visitors  have  an  official  refuge,  surrounded 
by  a  sheet-iron  wall,  which  no  outsider  may  enter  without  formal  per- 
mission. There  are  one  long  and  two  short  rooms  extending  the 
length  of  the  building,  and  the  Indians  had  swung  their  indispensable, 
home-woven  hammocks  side  by  side,  just  as  they  do  in  their  own 
wilderness  shelters.  The  large  room  was  for  ordinary  Indian  men, 
one  of  the  smaller  ones  for  married  couples,  and  the  third  for  "cap- 
tains," certified  river-pilots,  and  other  personages  of  importance — 
for  your  Englishman  never  forgets  caste,  even  among  aboriginal 
tribes.  Here  any  Indian  has  the  right,  and  is  expected,  to  come  and 
stay,  free  of  expense,  while  in  Georgetown,  buying  his  own  food  and 
cooking  it  himself  in  a  simple  kitchen  behind  the  building.  The  Depot 
was  erected  with  funds  accruing  from  "balata"  gathered  by  the  Indians, 
one-third  of  which  is  turned  into  the  colonial  treasury  and  the  rest 
into  an  Indian  reserve  fund  for  just  such  purposes. 

Not  only  in  her  grassy  lawns  and  wooden  houses,  her  stern  morality 
and  her  altruistic  treatment  of  the  aborigines,  does  Georgetown  remind 
the  Anglo-Saxon  wanderer  that  the  differences  between  his  own  and 
Latin-American  civilization  are  many,  significant  as  well  as  trivial. 
Here  he  will  find  again  that  love  of  nature,  or  of  outdoors,  which  is 


6o8  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

so  slight  in  the  rest  of  South  America.  By  seven  in  the  morning  even 
the  well-to-do  are  parading  the  sea-wall.  Though  there  is  no  lack 
of  carriages  and  automobiles,  all  classes  go  much  on  foot — the  mere 
sight  of  well-dressed  people  habitually  walking  seems  strange  to  the 
man  more  familiar  with  the  rest  of  the  continent.  Latin-Americans 
of  that  class  may  stroll  up  and  down  a  fashionable  promenade  of  a 
block  or  two  at  a  certain  hour  of  the  evening,  but  it  will  be  rather  to 
indulge  in  mutual  admiration  than  for  exercise.  Here  one  will  see 
again,  with  a  start  of  surprise,  w^iite  women  not  only  abroad  at  an 
early  hour,  but  pushing  baby-carriages.  In  all  the  rest  of  South 
America  it  would  be  unseemly  for  a  lady  to  pass  her  threshold  in 
the  morning,  except  to  go  to  church  and  possibly  to  shop,  or  to  be 
fully  dressed  and  powdered  before  mid-afternoon,  and  even  if  she 
knew  of  the  existence  of  perambulators,  she  certainly  would  not  con- 
descend to  propel  one  herself.  Another  English  touch  is  the  sight 
of  all  classes  riding  bicycles,  from  the  negro  postman  to  dainty,  veiled 
young  white  ladies — conduct  which  would  be  instantly  ruinous  to  any 
feminine  reputation  elsewhere  on  the  continent.  People  no  longer 
hiss  to  attract  attention ;  one  is  no  longer  a  sight  to  be  stared  at  from 
one  end  of  the  street  to  the  other ;  no  human  wrecks  come  pestering 
one  to  buy  sudden  fortune  in  the  form  of  a  dirty  rag  of  a  lottery  ticket ; 
money  is  worth  its  face  value  again  and  is  accepted  at  that  rate  without 
question — even  though  the  newcomer  may  get  hopelessly  entangled 
in  a  confusion  of  reckonings  in  shillings,  dollars,  cents,  and  pence. 
It  is  true  that  traffic  turns  to  the  left  and  that  audiences  sit  stiff  and 
motionless  as  wooden  images  at  band  concerts,  but  this  little  patch 
of  England  in  South  America  has  fine  big  school  buildings,  instead 
of  droning  choruses  of  children  packed  together  in  noisome  old 
hovels.  Where  there  are  many  negroes  there  are  apt  to  be  beggars, 
but  they  are  by  no  means  so  numerous  and  certainly  not  so  pestiferous 
in  Demerara  as  in  Brazil.  The  street-cars  are  not  divided  into  classes, 
and  one  may  ride  irrespective  of  the  shape  or  condition  of  one's  collar ; 
though  castes  are  recognized  in  a  different  way,  for  the  negro-Hindu 
motormen  and  conductors,  speaking  what  is  fondly  supposed  in  the 
West  Indies  to  be  English,  have  a  different  vocabulary  for  each  class. 
To  a  black  fellow-laborer  they  say  in  a  kindly,  familiar  tone,  "Get  off, 
mahn ;  heah  yo  street ;"  to  a  negro  market-woman,  impatiently,  "All 
right,  get  on,  ef  yo  goin' !"  but  to  a  white  man  of  any  standing,  in  a 
totally  dififerent  tone  and  timbre,  "Oh,  yes,  sir;  this  street,  sir;  all 
right,  thank  you,  sir." 


ROAMING  THE  THREE  GUIANAS  609 

Indians  of  many  tribes,  negroes  wild  and  tame,  Hindus,  Madras- 
sees,  Javanese,  "taki-taki,"  French  deportes,  tropical  Frenchmen, 
Dutchmen,  Ilnglishmen,  Chinese,  Portuguese,  and  chaotic  mixtures  of 
all  of  these— one  could  spend  a  lifetime  in  the  three  Guianas.  Many 
a  Frenchman  has  in  tiie  smallest  of  them.  The  Pilgrim  Fathers  first 
planned  to  come  to  Guiana ;  it  would  be  interesting  to  see  how  different 
their  descendants  would  be  now.  The  population  of  this  bit  of  Europe 
in  South  America  resembles  the  favorite  dish  of  the  British  section 
of  it,— the  "pepper-pot."  To  make  a  "pepper-pot"  one  throws  in'co  a 
huge  kettle  beef,  mutton,  fish,  fowl,  and  anything  else  that  will  cook 
which  turns  up  during  the  week,  adding  from  time  to  time  a  dash 
of  salt  and  many  native  peppers,  letting  it  all  stew  for  days,  until 
it  results  in  an  effective  but  indistinguishable  concoction.  The  time 
may  come  when  the  unadulterated  white  man  will  recognize  what 
looks  like  a  dot  on  the  map  as  a  part  of  his  heritage,  particularly  the 
great  elevated  wilderness  and  savannahs  back  of  the  motley-peopled 
sea-coast.  My  latest  letter  from  Hart  talks  of  cattle  by  thousands  of 
head,  and  reports  the  completion  of  a  cattle  trail  forty  feet  wide, 
though  with  all  large  trees  left  standing,  from  Melville's  on  the  Dada- 
nawa  to  within  reach  of  Georgetown.  In  such  a  land  it  is  nip  and 
tuck  now  as  to  whether  the  railroad  or  the  automobile  will  take  first 
place  in  a  development  that  is  certain  to  come  in  the  not  far  distant 
future. 


CHAPTER    XXII 

THE    TRACKLESS    LLANOS    OF    VENEZUELA 

MEN  have  been  known  to  make  their  way  directly  from  British 
Guiana  to  Venezuela;  but  the  effects  of  the  World  War 
were  widespread  and  only  by  taking  an  ocean  liner  to  Trini- 
dad and  transferring  to  an  Orinoco  river-steamer  could  I  begin  the 
next  and  last  stage  of  my  South  American  journey,  a  tramp  across 
tlie  Land  of  Bolivar — and  Castro.  By  an  extraordinary  stroke  of 
luck  the  Apure  of  the  "Compafiia  Venezolana  Costeira  y  Fluvial"  was 
returning  that  very  day,  after  a  month  of  repairs  in  Port-of-Spain,  to 
her  regular  run  on  the  upper  Orinoco,  so  that  in  less  time  than  it  takes 
properly  to  fulfill  the  protracted  consular  formalities  required  of  those 
entering  Venezuela  I  was  on  my  way  as  the  only  passenger  across 
the  Bocas  in  just  such  a  frail,  two-story,  side-wheel  craft  as  that 
by  which  Hays  and  I  had  crawled  up  the  Magdalena  into  South 
America  three  years  before. 

There  was  little  new  along  the  lower  Orinoco  to  one  who  had  seen 
every  large  river  of  the  continent.  Here  and  there  a  canoe  paddled 
by  naked  Indians  nearly  as  light  as  a  sunburned  white  man  crept 
along  the  lower  fringe  of  one  or  the  other  mighty  forest  wall.  A 
few  huts,  mostly  abandoned,  on  the  right-hand  bank  we  almost 
constantly  hugged,  with  now  and  then  a  cornfield  chopped  out  of  the 
forest,  were  the  only  other  evidences  of  humanity.  Where  we  stopped 
for  firewood,  groups  of  Indian  men  and  women,  some  of  them  wearing 
clothes  and  all  of  them  showing  in  their  degenerate,  vicious  faces 
evidence  of  having  made  the  acquaintance  of  what  we  proudly  call 
civilization,  lounged  in  the  edge  of  the  jungle  watching  our  slightest 
movements.  Their  huts  were  only  four  poles  holding  up  a  thatch  roof, 
but  every  person  had  his  own  hammock,  covered  by  a  mosquitero 
reaching  to  the  ground.  Gradually  hills  closed  in  on  us,  low,  thickly 
wooded,  with  great  granite  outcroppings.  Two  old  yellow  forts  ap- 
peared, the  one  on  the  higher  hill  already  a  ruin,  the  other  flying  the 
yellow,  blue,  and  red  flag  of  Venezuela,  with  quite  a  village  of  huts 
below  it  for  the  half-Indian  soldiers  in  khaki  and  their  slattern  wo- 

6io 


THE  TRACKLESS  LLANOS  OF  VENEZUELA         6ii 

men.  These  "Castillos  de  Guayana"  were  built  by  the  Spaniards  to 
protect  the  entrance  to  the  Orinoco,  and  it  is  mainly  pride  which 
causes  their  feebler  descendants  to  keep  up  the  fiction.  For  the 
authority  of  Caracas  is  little  more  than  theoretical  in  that  half  of 
Venezuela  called  Guayana  which  lay  hidden  in  densest  wilderness  on 
our  left. 

As  we  neared  Ciudad  Bolivar,  white-winged  boats  more  comfortable 
than  the  wall-less  dwellings  along  shore,  each  with  a  huge  number 
painted  on  its  sails,  came  down  the  light-brown  river  among  the  small 
floating  islands  it  had  torn  off  far  above.  The  typically  "Spig"  city 
lay  piled  up  over  a  knoll  on  the  southern  bank,  scattered  portions  of 
it  spilling  over  the  rolling  and  marshy  country  roundabout.  A  few 
feet  from  shore  we  were  ordered  to  halt  and  await  a  "visit,"  and  it 
was  hours  later  that  the  languid,  futile  formalities  were  ended.  The 
chief  excitement  in  town  was  "the  dike,"  a  great  w'all  built  to  keep 
back  the  water  from  the  flooded  campos,  now  leaking  until  the  great 
lagoon  which  always  forms  at  the  foot  of  the  town  during  the  rainy 
season  was  driving  out  the  dwellers  in  the  lower  fringe  of  huts.  Half 
the  city  had  come  out  to  see  prisoners  from  tlie  cared,  under  even 
more  evil-eyed  soldiers  from  the  cuartel,  strive  to  stop  the  leaks  by 
letting  cowhides  over  the  side  of  the  w^all  and  tamping  apathetically 
here  and  there  with  their  clumsy  tools.  But  it  is  the  Venezuelan 
custom  for  jailers  to  steal  most  of  the  rations  to  which  their  charges 
are  entitled,  and  the  prisoners  were  in  no  condition  to  accomplish 
their  task,  even  had  they  had  any  incentive  to  do  so.  I  was  startled  to 
hear  a  voice  behind  me  say,  "I  fear  we  all  go'n'  get  de  wash-out,  sah." 

At  least  it  gave  one  a  sense  of  not  being  entirely  cut  oft  from  the 
more  orderly  world  to  hear  English-speaking  negroes  in  the  streets 
of  Ciudad  Bolivar,  and  their  presence  made  other  foreigners  less 
subject  to  constant  open-mouthed  scrutiny.  Hackmen,  chauffeurs, 
nurse-girls,  and  servants  in  general  were  commonly  Guianese  or  West 
Indian  negroes,  so  that  my  native  tongue  often  sounded  in  my  ears. 
The  rest  of  the  population  was  that  of  almost  all  Spanish-American 
cities, — few  pure  whites  and  fewer  full  Indians,  but  every  possible 
mixture  of  the  two,  with  a  goodly  dash  of  African  blood  thrown  in 
to  complete  the  catastrophe. 

Whatever  beauty  Ciudad  Bolivar  has  is  indoors.  No  green  lawns 
or  flower-gardens  cheer  the  eye  of  the  passer-by,  though  now  and 
then  a  glimpse  through  a  doorway  along  the  deadly  line  of  dirty  stucco 
walls  reveals  a  patio  filled  with  blossoms  and  tropical  shrubbery,  witli 


6i2  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

perhaps  a  fountain.  Even  inside  is  no  patch  of  Eden.  Parrots,  as  well 
as  all  domestic  fowls,  contest  the  average  patio  with  dogs,  pigs,  naked 
urchins,  and  adults.  It  is  in  conformity  with  his  other  cruelties  to  dumb 
brutes,  his  total  lack  of  compassion,  that  the  keeping  of  caged  animals 
is  an  inherent  trait  of  the  South  American.  Back  of  the  city  lies  an 
extensive  swamp  from  which  come  great  numbers  of  mosquitoes,  the 
same  swamp  that  the  people  were  struggling  so  energetically  to  have 
their  jailbirds  hold  in  check.  It  is  often  hot  by  day,  but  at  night  a 
cool  breeze  sweeps  in  from  the  broad  Orinoco  and  the  town  casts  off 
its  torpor.  Lights  spring  up,  gaudily  dressed  and  heavily  powdered 
women  lean  on  their  elbows  behind  the  heavy  wooden  window-bars, 
the  band  plays  along  the  waterfront  Alameda,  the  streets  are  filled 
with  a  roving  crowd  of  carnal-minded  men  and  boys,  and  Ciudad 
Bolivar  seems  for  a  space  almost  a  wide-awake  city. 

The  Venezuelans  refused  to  take  my  proposed  walk  across  the 
country  seriously,  so  that  it  was  doubly  difficult  to  get  trustworthy 
information.  The  llanos  were  said  to  be  flooded  at  that  season,  and 
the  overland  journey  to  Caracas  was  reputed  to  be  i8o  leagues,  a 
mere  540  miles !  I  dared  not  send  myself  forth  on  any  such  unneces- 
sary stroll  as  that,  for  I  had  solemnly  sworn  to  be  home  at  all  costs 
within  four  years  of  my  departure,  and  it  was  already  the  end  of 
July.  But  at  least  I  could  tramp  straight  across  to  the  Atlantic,  and 
find  swifter  means  of  transportation  to  La  Guayra  and  Caracas.  There 
were  worse  stories  of  the  dangers  of  a  lone  "gringo"  wandering  through 
Venezuela  than  in  any  other  South  American  country.  Revolutionists 
had  for  months  infested  the  very  territory  in  which  I  proposed  to 
risk  my  life — but  I  remembered  the  tale  of  the  Venezuelan  colonel  sent 
with  his  regiment  to  wage  battle  over  the  range,  who  came  hurrying 
back  at  the  head  of  his  troops,  to  report,  "My  general,  just  over  the 
summit  we  met  two  drunken  Americans,  and  they  would  not  let  us 
pass !"  Besides,  the  war  in  Europe  had  made  it  difficult  for  bandiiis 
and  revolutionists  to  get  arms  and  ammunition.  "But  at  least,"  cried 
the  natives,  "you  must  have  a  mule  and  a  saddle !"  and  a  kind  man 
offered  to  sell  me  such  an  outfit,  "all  ready  to  mount" — for  a  thousand 
holivares!  True,  a  bolivar  is  no  more  than  a  franc,  but  a  thousand 
of  them  was  more  than  I  was  depending  upon  to  set  me  down  in  one 
of  our  north  central  states, 

I  was  reduced,  therefore,  to  my  usual  common  denominator, — en- 
gaging my  own  instincts  as  guide  and  hiring  my  own  feet  to  carry  my- 
self and  my  belongings.     A  certain  reduction  of  the  latter  was  im- 


THE  TRACKLESS  LLANOS  OF  VENEZUELA         613 

perative.  The  most  effective  accomplishment  in  that  respect  was  the 
trading  of  my  heavy  Ceara  hammock — though  it  was  like  dismissing 
an  old  friend,  for  I  had  slept  in  it  since  long  before  Carlos  died — for 
one  made  of  curagna  by  the  Indians  of  the  Orinoco.  This  was  a  mere 
grass  net,  being  woven  of  liie  fibrous  leaf  of  a  small  wild  plant  related 
to  the  pineapple ;  but  it  weighed  only  iorty  ounces,  ropes  and  all,  and 
is  capable  of  holding  me  comfortably  in  its  lap  to  this  day.  As  I 
was  taking  leave  of  the  native-born  American  consul,  m}-  attention 
was  drawn  to  great  blocks  of  yellowish  stuff  in  his  warehouse  that 
were  sewed  up  in  sacking  and  stenciled  for  shipment  to  the  United 
States.  It  turned  out  to  be  chicle,  the  milky  juice  of  the  sapodilla 
tree,  which  flourishes  along  the  Orinoco,  boiled  down  and  dried  for 
use  in  the  one  land  that  appreciates  so  doubtful  a  luxury.  The  consul 
gave  me  a  piece,  very  light  in  weight  and  of  the  size  of  my  fist,  and 
the  wisest  thing  I  did  in  Venezuela  was  not  to  throw  it  away — not 
simply  because  it  was  pure  chewing-gum,  lacking  only  the  sweetish 
flavor,  but  because  it  saved  me  many  a  thirsty  hour  in  my  tramp  across 
the  arid  country. 

The  Orinoco  sweeps  swiftly  past  Ciudad  Bolivar,  formerly  called 
Angostura — the  "Narrows" — a  big  rounded  rock  breasting  the  cur- 
rent in  midstream.  I  crossed  it  in  one  of  the  little  sailboats  with 
numbered  sails,  speeding  along  before  a  stiff  breeze  that  seemed  to 
whip  us  swiftly  forward,  until  a  glance  at  the  shores  showed  that 
we  were  really  moving  backward  downstream,  so  swift  was  the 
current.  Only  gradually  did  we  make  the  opposite  bank,  and  it  took 
nearly  an  hour  to  pole  our  way  back  to  Soledad,  just  across  from  where 
we  had  started.  One  could  scarcely  blame  this  hamlet,  justly  named 
Solitude,  if  it  looked  unwashed;  only  the  day  before  a  boy  of  twelve 
had  stepped  into  the  river  for  a  bath  and  an  alligator  had  walked  oft 
with  him  for  its  Sunday  dinner.  Still,  the  place  had  children  to 
spare.  Staggering  ashore  under  my  bagful  of  assorted  junk,  I  at 
once  struck  out  along  the  "camino  real,"  a  mere  trail  which  first 
climbed  to  a  slight  plateau  with  a  view  back  on  Ciudad  Bolivar,  then 
broke  into  thinly  scrub-wooded  pampa  or  sandy  llanos  covered  with 
tuft-grass  as  far  as  the  eye  could  see.  As  the  "royal  road"  showcil 
a  constant  tendency  to  split  up  into  many  paths  that  lost  themselves 
in  the  heavy  grass.  I  had  to  trust  mainly  to  compass  and  instinct.  At 
noon  I  stopped  at  a  ir.udhole  fringed  with  cattle-tracks  to  eat  a  square 
yard  of  cassava-bread  v/ashed  down  with  handfuls  of  muddy  water. 
The  sweat  poured  off  me  in  streams  under  my  big.  awkward  burden. 


6i4  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

and  it  soon  became  aprarent  that  I  must  still  further  reduce  my  load. 
Then  and  there  I  gave  my  leather  leggings  to  a  passing  half-Indian 
horseman,  who,  to  prove  his  aboriginal  blood,  did  not  so  much  as 
thank  me.  Three  Indians  in  hats,  loin-cloths  and  pieces  of  jackets, 
with  an  old  rifle  each,  loping  noiselessly  past,  aroused  my  envy. 

The  sun  was  still  troublesome  when  I  came  to  a  miserable  village 
of  half  a  dozen  mud-and-thatch  ruins,  before  which  ragged  men  sat 
in  deep  silence,  now  and  then  heaving  a  long  sigh  and  relapsing  again 
into  silence,  I  coaxed  one  of  them  to  row  me  across  the  La  Pifia 
River,  and  plodded  on.  What  time  it  was  when  I  reached  a  ranch 
called  "El  Ortic'ero"  I  cannot  say,  for  the  crystal  and  minute-hand  of 
my  aged  tin  watch  had  succumbed  to  the  day's  struggle,  and  the  rest 
of  the  contraption  functioned  only  intermittently.  I  pressed  it  upon 
my  old  but  artless  host,  and  a  chicken  died  in  consequence.  But 
the  fowl  was  evidently  both  young  and  slender,  for  the  entire  dinner 
consisted  of  a  thin  soup  with  a  few  scraps  of  chicken  in  it  and  a  bowl 
of  milk.  No  wonder  these  people  have  no  energy;  this  to  them  was 
a  gala  meal. 

The  considerable  wait  from  dawn  to  sunrise  was  scarcely  worth 
the  small  cup  of  black  coffee,  or  rather,  gnarapo,  which  the  brewing 
of  last  night's  coffee  grounds  yielded.  Passing  the  cowyard  as  I  set 
out,  however,  I  got  a  bowl  of  foaming  milk  with  which  to  wash  down 
another  shaving  of  cassava.  In  the  middle  of  the  morning  a  strong 
fever  came  upon  me,  forcing  me  to  lie  down  in  scrubby  shade  on  the 
sand  and  tuft-grass  for  an  hour  or  more.  When  I  could  endure  my 
raging  thirst  no  longer,  I  crawled  to  my  feet  and  stumbled  on  across 
the  blazing,  choking  semi-desert  in  a  for  a  long  time  vain  quest  for 
water.  At  last  I  came  upon  a  red-hot  sandy  bed,  along  which  crawled 
a  stream  half  an  inch  deep  where  I  scooped  out  a  hole  and,  when  it 
had  somewhat  cleared,  inhaled  in  one  breath  a  good  quart  of  the 
lukewarm  water.  A  reasonable  man,  recognizing  the  trip  I  had  laid 
out  for  myself  as  a  mere  "stunt,"  would  have  given  up  and  returned 
to  Ciudad  Bohvar  and  Trinidad;  but  I  was  born  bull-headed.  I 
staggered  on,  and  at  length  sighted  a  countryman's  thatched  hut — an 
hato,  they  call  it  in  Venezuela — where  I  was  welcomed  with  bucolic 
but  genuine  hospitality  and  motioned  to  a  seat  on  a  whitened  horse- 
skull.  I  swung  my  hammock  instead.  When  this  had  reduced  my 
weariness,  I  took  uj)  the  imperative  question  of  doing  the  same  for  my 
pack,  absolutely  refusing  to  stagger  farther  under  such  a  load  in 
vuch  a  climate.     I  threw  aside  my  heavy  shoes,  thereby  taking  the 


THE  TRACKLESS  LLANOS  OF  VENEZUELA         615 

weight  of  the  low  city  ones  off  my  shoulders,  following  them  with 
a  pair  of  wintry  trousers  and  1  wurkingman's  shirt  I  had  seldom  worn. 
The  shoes  and  several  odds  and  ends  I  bequeathed  to  the  woman  of 
the  hato,  for  her  absent  husband;  the  trousers  and  shirt  went  to  a 
visiting  neighbor,  who  promised  to  guide  me  in  the  morning  to  the 
n»xt  hamlet.  I  threw  away  the  tin  cans  that  protected  my  exposed 
kodak  films,  all  but  the  quinine  I  should  need  for  the  next  fortnight, 
almost  all  my  other  medicines,  two-thirds  of  my  soap,  most  of  my  ink 
in  the  bottle  1  had  carried  from  Quito,  and  I  even  cut  in  two  my  tube  of 
dental  paste.  The  woman  and  her  visitor  accepted  all  these  things 
;vith  labial  thanks,  but  my  strongest  hints  produced  nothing  to  ap- 
pease my  appetite.  The  sun  was  casting  its  rays  in  upon  me  under 
the  thatch  roof  before  we  sat  down  before  a  little  plate  of  fried 
mango,  a  kind  of  armadillo  stew,  and  little  bowls  of  coffee — well 
enough,  but  just  one-tenth  as  much  as  I  could  have  eaten  myself. 

"For  aqui  son  la  gente  muy  amigos  al  intcres,"  said  my  ungram- 
matical  guide,  when  the  woman  was  out  of  hearing ;  "Here  people  are 
friends  of  their  own  interest.  If  you  had  no  money  to  buy  food,  or  if 
you  had  not  given  her  all  those  fine  things,  you  would  not  even  have 
got  this,  but  might  have  starved  before  her  eyes." 

The  truth  is  that  the  country  people  of  Venezuela  have  almost 
nothing  to  eat  themselves,  much  less  anything  to  share.  They  have 
not  the  energy  to  grow  much  of  anything,  no  one  has  the  energy  to 
bring  things  to  sell  from  town ;  and  under  such  a  blistering  sun  I  do 
not  know  that  I  blame  them.  More  disheartening  still  is  the  govern- 
ment of  unenlightened  tyrants  under  which  they  live.  This  woman 
and  her  husband — their  story  is  typical  of  thousands — once  had  more 
than  a  hundred  head  of  cattle,  and  other  possessions  in  proportion. 
Came  Castro  with  his  fellow-rascals  and  stole  or  ate  the  whole  herd. 
One  has  little  inspiration  to  pile  up  possessions  by  rude  labor  under 
a  tropical  sun  for  the  advantage  of  the  next  passing  band  of  ruffians. 
These  poor,  sequestered  people  in  their  tucked  away  hatos  were 
typical  of  all  the  campo,  with  its  stories  of  oppression,  tyranny, 
treachery,  and  stark  brutality,  all  told  in  a  gentle,  uncomplaining 
voice  and  manner,  avoiding  any  direct  reference  to  the  chief  tyrant, 
as  if  even  the  palm-trees  had  ears,  and  replying  to  all  pertinent  ques- 
tions with  that  helpless,  hopeless,  irresponsible,  non-committal  "Quicn 
saber 

Somewhat  reduced  in  load,  though  still  overburdened,  I  set  out  again 
next  morning.    A  tiny  cup  of  black  coffee  was  what  I  was  expected  to 


6i6  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

start  on,  but  I  managed  to  beg  two  half -ripe  mangos.  In  my  light 
shoes  and  reduced  pack  I  spun  along  splendidly — so  long  as  I  had  any 
road  to  spin  on.  Just  there  was  the  rub.  Don  Augustin,  the  hato 
visitor,  had  left  with  me,  carrying  the  shirt  and  trousers  I  had  given 
him  to  guide  me  to  the  next  hamlet.  But  when,  some  four  or  five  miles 
on,  we  had  come  upon  an  Indian  hut  and  bought  two  patillas,  a  kind 
of  watermelon,  for  ten  cents,  he  announced  that  he  was  going  a 
league  westward  to  his  own  house  to  get  his  hammock,  and  that  I  was 
to  go  "straight  ahead"  along  the  road  he  pointed  out,  until  he  caught 
up  with  me.  Both  he  and  the  "Caribes,"  as  Venezuela  calls  the 
aborigines  of  this  region,  assured  me  that  I  could  not  possibly  go 
astray — yet  I  had  not  covered  two  hundred  yards  of  that  sandy, 
coarse-grassed  pampa  before  another  "road"  led  off,  just  such  a  nar- 
row path  as  the  one  I  was  on.  Then  came  fork  after  fork  in  swift 
succession,  until  I  was  involved  in  a  network,  an  absolute  labyrinth 
of  trails,  any  one  of  which  was  as  likely  to  be  the  "royal  road"  as  any 
other.  I  took  one  after  another,  only  to  have  the  path  dwindle  and 
fade  from  under  my  feet  in  the  high  grass  and  be  gone.  Several 
led  to  the  charred  remains  of  an  Indian  hut ;  one  finally  brought  me  out 
before  such  a  hovel  still  standing,  where  half  a  dozen  Indian  women, 
all  but  stark  naked,  squatted  and  lolled  on  the  earth  floor,  three  of 
them  suckling  cadaverous  and  filthy  brats,  and  all  languidly  engaged 
in  scratching  their  leathery  bare  skins.  They  spoke  little  or  no  Spanish, 
but  seemed  to  imply  that  I  should  take  a  road  down  into  a  valley.  I 
took  it,  lost  it,  again  found  pieces  of  it,  or  some  other  path,  lost  those, 
brought  up  in  a  stream  that  soaked  me  to  the  thighs,  and  seeing 
w^orse  ahead,  as  well  as  evidence  that  this  was  not  the  right  direction, 
I  scrambled  my  way  back  to  the  Indian  women.  But  they  were  just 
as  naked  and  ignorant  as  ever.  I  gave  up.  though  it  was  still  morning 
and  I  was  anxious  to  push  on,  and  swung  my  hammock  under  a  roof 
on  poles  beside  such  road  as  there  was,  got  into  pajamas  so  that  I  could 
spread  my  dripping  garments  in  the  sun,  snatching  them  in  again  for 
several  light  showers  and  hoped  against  hope  that  some  one  with 
human  intelligence  would  come  along  and  give  me  information. 

Hope  having  died  and  my  clothing  being  nearly  dry,  I  harnessed 
up  again  and  went  back  once  more  to  the  Indian  hut.  This  time  the 
man  was  there.  He  gave  me  in  fluent  Spanish  verbose  directions 
concerning  a  "road"  alleged  to  lead  directly  to  "El  Descanso,"  which 
was  close  by,  without  a  chance  of  my  missing  it.  Simple  as  his  direc- 
tions sounded  to  the  fellow  himself,  I  offered  him  money  to  take  me 


THE  TRACKLESS  LLANOS  OF  VENEZUELA        617 

there ;  but  he  replied  that  he  was  a  consumptive  with  fever — and 
he  looked  it.  Within  a  quarter  of  a  mile  that  "direct"  road  forked 
into  at  least  twenty  similar  paths,  every  one  of  which  looked  as  direct 
as  the  others.  Catching  sight  of  a  hut  down  in  a  valley,  I  made  for 
it  through  sticky  mud — and  found  it  open  and  quite  evidently  inhabi- 
ted, but  with  only  a  squalling  infant  in  a  hammock  within  sound  of 
my  voice.  I  waded  back  to  more  trails  upon  trails  across  swamps  and 
through  tangled  undergrowth,  saw  another  hut  on  a  hill,  climbed  to  it 
and  found  it  abandoned,  saw  another  across  a  swampy  valley  and 
struck  out  for  that.  This  time  it  was  a  large  house  or  collection  of 
houses  with  solid  mud  walls,  instead  of  mere  reeds,  the  shaggy 
iliatched  roof  "banged"  at  the  doorways,  and  other  signs  of  affluence 
and  intelligent  information — but  every  door  was  padlocked. 

There  was  no  use  making  any  more  blind  guesses.  I  swung  my 
hammock  under  a  tree  at  the  gate,  where  another  ass  tied  to  a  post 
was  already  dozing,  resolved  to  stay  until  my  luck  changed.  For  what 
seemed  hours  I  hovered  on  the  brink  of  starvation,  when  there  appeared 
across  the  rolling,  weed-grown  country  what  looked  like  a  horseman 
on  a  mule.  Illusion !  It  was  only  a  boy  on  a  jacl:ass.  He  knew 
nothing  of  roads,  but  he  did  bring  me  the  information  that  I  was  even 
then  at  "El  Descanso,"  the  very  place  I  had  been  seeking,  and  that 
the  people  who  lived  there  would  be  back  "soon."  Also  he  sold  me 
three  mangos,  but  I  had  not  even  a  knife,  and  to  rob  a  mango  of  its 
substance  with  a  small  pair  of  scissors  and  one's  teeth  is  as  harrowing 
as  not  to  be  able  to  find  a  drop  of  water  after  the  ordeal  is  over.  Also 
in  such  a  climate  it  is  a  fine  fruit  for  those  who  wish  to  die  young. 
But  at  least  I  was  passing  the  most  blistering  hours  of  the  day  in 
breezy  shade  in  a  spot  appropriately  named  "The  Rest." 

It  must  have  been  four  o'clock,  and  for  two  hours  I  had  been 
enjoying  a  fever,  not  the  burning  one  of  the  day  before,  but  the  languid 
kind  one  almost  luxuriates  in  so  long  as  one  can  lie  still.  Not  a  sound 
had  there  been  in  all  this  time  except  the  lazy  sighing  of  the  breeze 
in  the  scattered  shrubs  and  an  occasional  protest  from  the  other  hungry 
donkey.  Then  all  at  once  I  heard  a  woman  or  a  boy  shout  within  twenty 
feet  of  me ;  but  when  I  sat  up  and  called  back  there  was  no  answer.  I 
had  wandered  twice  around  the  house,  and  the  call  had  been  several  times 
repeated,  before  I  discovered  that  it  came  from  the  family  parrot, 
perched  on  the  ridge  of  the  roof.  Again  and  again  it  hallooed  across 
hill  and  swamp,  in  exactly  the  tone  and  voice  of  a  South  American 
country  woman,  telling  some  one  in  clear,  impeccable  Spanish  to  come 


6i8  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

home  at  once,  that  some  one  was  there,  and  more  to  the  same  effect. 
At  last  an  answering  voice,  and  then  several  came  faintly  across  the 
valley,  sounding  steadily  nearer,  and  finally  two  girls,  one  already 
married,  shuffled  up  in  alpargatas  and  the  shapeless  loose  calico  dresses 
of  their  class.  The  older  one  seemed  resentful,  and  the  younger 
frightened,  at  sight  of  a  man,  even  out  under  their  gate-tree,  and  as 
I  was  just  then  enjoying  another  wave  of  fever,  I  continued  to  wait, 
hoping  they  would  be  followed  by  some  one  of  my  own  sex.  When  it 
began  to  grow  dark,  however,  I  went  to  ask  the  older  girl  if  she  could 
cook  me  something.  No,  there  was  not  a  mouthful  of  anything  in  the 
house.  Well,  how  much  for  a  chicken?  Forty  cents.  I  gave  it,  and 
lay  in  my  hammock  for  another  interminable  hour.  Then  she  came 
to  ask  if  cheese  would  not  do !  I  told  her  in  a  voice  one  does  not 
customarily  use  to  ladies  that  I  had  paid  for  chicken,  and  she  shuffled 
away  again ;  and  long  after  dark  she  brought  the  cooked  fowl  intact, 
broth  and  all,  with  a  bowl  of  goat's  milk.  But  by  this  time  fever  had 
routed  my  appetite  and  I  could  not  drink  more  than  half  the  broth 
and  a  bit  of  milk,  so  I  wrapped  the  chicken  in  a  paper  and  hung  it 
from  a  rafter  of  the  empty  sheep-pen  without  walls,  to  which  I  retired 
rather  than  keep  the  timid  maidens  up  all  night  by  staying  in  the 
house. 

The  girls  had  no  knowledge  that  roads  ever  ran  anywhere,  and 
were  even  more  grouchy  and  uncompassionate  the  next  morning  when 
I  wheedled  another  bowl  of  milk  and  struck  off  at  random.  Troubles 
never  come  singly,  and  when  I  took  down  the  chicken  I  looked  for- 
ward to  feasting  upon  later  in  the  day  I  found  that  a  colony  of  ants 
had  anticipated  me,  and  there  was  barely  a  scrap  of  meat  left.  As 
it  was  plainly  up  to  me  to  get  somewhere,  I  took  the  first  of  several 
trails  leading  down  into  the  valley  in  a  general  northerly  direction. 
It  showed  a  few  burro-tracks  for  a  way,  but  gradually  split  up  into 
ever  dwindling  paths,  all  of  which  ended  sooner  or  later  in  morichales, 
those  great  bog  swamps  filled  with  every  difficulty  and  danger  from 
entangled  roots  to  alligators,  and  densely  shaded  by  the  moriche 
palms  from  which  \"enezuela  makes  her  hammocks.  It  would  be  easier 
to  get  through  a  stone  wall.  At  length  I  tried  a  path  leading  almost 
southwest,  determined  to  get  around  the  swamp  by  a  flanking  move- 
ment, but  I  barely  saved  myself  from  dropping  into  a  sinkhole  of 
quicksands.  Back  on  dry  land  again,  I  kept  to  the  highlands  for 
miles,  at  times  plodding  in  exactly  the  opposite  direction  from  that 
in  which  I  was  bound,  now  and  then  wading  a  patch  of  marsh  and 


THE  TRACKLESS  LLANOS  OF  VENEZUELA        619 

finally,  crossing  the  stream  near  its  outlet  from  the  moriclial,  arriving 
famished  at  a  hut  almost  within  gunshot  of  "El  Descanso."  Here 
the  family  of  the  boy  who  had  sold  me  the  mangos  the  day  before 
was  engaged  in  the  favorite  Venezuelan  occupation  of  lying  in  ham- 
mocks, but  the  woman  had  more  than  the  racial  average  of  humanity 
and  intelligence  and  for  the  sum  of  ten  cents  she  place'd  before  me 
four  fried  eggs,  than  which  nothing  had  tasted  better  as  far  back  as 
I  could  remember.  Then  they  directed  me  to  San  Pedro,  and  by 
some  strange  luck  I  managed  to  keep  the  right  one  of  the  labyrinth  of 
paths  across  the  deadly  still,  sandy  prairie,  with  its  coarse,  uninviting 
grass  and  ugly  scrub  trees,  to  a  kind  of  country  store,  where  two 
tiny  stale  biscuits  and  a  mashed-corn  loaf,  called  arcpa,  gave  me  the 
strength  to  push  on. 

Getting  careful  directions,  I  set  off  for  Tabaro,  and  nothing  could 
have  been  easier  than  to  find  my  way  across  this  flat,  hot  plain,  utterly 
waterless,  so  that  all  the  way  to  that  cluster  of  huts  I  subsisted  on 
three  small  lemons.  But  I  might  have  known  that  this  easy  going 
was  only  a  lull  before  the  storm.  They  sent  a  boy  a  little  way  from 
Tabaro  to  put  me  on  the  right  road,  "which  goes  straight,  straight, 
without  a  chance  to  lose  your  way,  and  anyway  you  can  follow  the 
tracks  of  this  horse,  which  just  left  for  there."  Follow  his  Satanic 
Majesty !  There  is  not  a  human  being,  unless  he  knew  it  already, 
who  could  have  distinguished  that  path  from  a  hundred  and  fifty 
others,  of  cows,  horses,  mules,  and  everything  else  that  goes  on  four 
legs  in  Venezuela.  I  took  the  one  that  looked  most  promising,  landed 
in  a  morkhal,  pulled  off  my  shoes  and  waded  for  some  distance  in 
black  mud,  tore  through  more  tangled  undergrowth,  and  found  myself 
only  at  the  beginning  of  the  real  struggle.  Removing  my  trousers  in 
the  hope  of  saving  enough  of  them  to  escape  arrest  if  ever  I  struggled 
my  way  back  to  civilization,  I  attacked  the  swamp  and  jungle  with  all 
the  force  I  had  left,  cutting  my  feet  and  legs,  gashing  hands  and 
even  my  face,  sinking  to  my  waist  in  the  slough,  watching  the  sun 
rapidly  setting  on  a  night  that  I  was  not  only  doomed  to  spend  out  of 
doors  without  food,  but  evidently  immersed  in  mud  and  without  water 
to  drink.  Then  all  at  once  I  burst  out  upon  the  brink  of  a  large,  swift 
river.  I  had  already  heard  of  it,  but  was  supposed  to  come  upon  it 
at  an  hato  called  "El  Cardon"  and  be  set  across  in  the  owner's  canoe. 
There  was  no  sign  of  human  existence,  much  less  of  a  farmhouse, 
and  the  river  was  plainly  too  swii't  to  swim  with  my  load,  even  if  it 


620  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

were  not  full  of  alligators.  Besides,  the  most  important  thing  just 
then  was  rest,  for  I  was  weak  from  fever  and  lack  of  food. 

The  red  sun  sank  behind  the  tree-tops  to  the  east — no,  if  I  could 
have  gotten  my  bearings  right,  I  believe  it  would  have  proved  the 
west.  I  hung  my  hammock  between  two  scrubs,  bathed  on  the  bank 
of  the  river,  drank  several  handfuls  of  it  for  supper,  and  rolled  in. 
To  add  to  the  pleasure  of  the  situation  the  one  book  I  happened  to 
have  with  me  opened  to  a  chapter  entitled  "The  English  Cuisine !" 
Being  absolutely  devoid  of  shelter,  I  had  dragged  a  few  fallen  moriche 
leaves  together  and  made  a  tiny  lean-to  beside  me  under  which  to 
shield  my  scanty  possessions.  It  was  in  keeping  with  my  luck  in  this 
thirteenth  Latin-American  country  in  which  I  had  traveled  that 
for  the  first  night  since  I  had  reached  Venezuela  it  should  rain.  I 
was  awakened  first  by  some  wild  beast  nearly  as  large  as  a  yearling 
calf,  which  dashed  out  of  the  undergrowth,  uttered  a  strange  cry  at 
sight  of  my  hammock,  and  sprang  in  one  leap  directly  over  me  and 
into  the  stream  with  a  great  splash.  I  emptied  my  revolver  after  it, 
but  it  quickly  disappeared.  By  the  time  I  had  hunted  cartridges  in 
the  dark  and  loaded  again — for  some  other  heavy  animal  seemed  to 
be  prowling  about  in  the  brush — it  began  to  sprinkle,  with  lightning 
flashes,  and  then  it  turned  to  a  real  rain.  I  adopted  the  Amazonian 
means  of  keeping  dry,  stripped  naked,  rolled  clothes  and  hammock 
into  a  bundle  I  could  thrust  under  the  improvised  shelter,  and  sat 
down  upon  the  unprotected  corner  of  my  stuff  and  let  it  rain.  Luck- 
ily, it  did  not  continue  long,  and  within  half  an  hour  I  had  rolled  up 
in  my  hammock  again. 

When  next  I  woke,  in  a  breeze  so  cool  that  I  put  on  my  daytime 
clothing  over  my  pajamas,  the  stars  were  shining.  But  this  was  base 
deception,  for  I  was  awakened  later  by  a  veritable  downpour,  without 
even  time  to  strip,  and  could  only  huddle  over  my  belongings  and 
keep  as  much  water  off  them  as  possible.  Soon  afterward  dawn  came 
and  the  next  problem  after  getting  my  wet  mess  together  was  to  de- 
cide whether  to  go  up  or  down  stream.  Nowhere  was  there  a  sign 
that  man  had  ever  before  been  in  those  parts.  I  chose  upstream,  and 
quickly  plunged  again  into  another  morichal,  such  a  jungle  and 
swamp,  filled  with  the  odor  of  rotting  vegetation,  as  only  wild  men 
or  lost  ones  attempt  to  fight  their  way  through.  Plants  with  sharks' 
teeth,  sabre  cacti  with  hook-shaped  horns  and  needle  points  along  the 
edge,  upright  sprays  of  vegetable  bayonets,  grappled  and  pierced 
clothes  and  skin.     Through  this  mass  I  tore  and  waded  barefoot  for 


THE  TRACKLESS  LLANOS  OF  VENEZUELA         621 

perhaps  two  hours,  by  no  means  certain  there  was  any  end  to  it;  but 
finally,  with  legs  and  feet  a  patchwork  of  cuts  and  scratches,  and  my 
shirt  in  rags,  I  came  out  upon  another  vast,  tuft-grass  and  sandy 
prairie.  On  these  inmiense  scrub-wooded  plains,  crisscrossed  in 
every  direction  by  narrow  cowpaths,  but  rarely  by  human  trails,  a 
man  might  wander  until  he  choked  or  starved.  I  followed  one  path 
several  miles  until  it  died  a  lingering  death,  then  fearful  of  losing  even 
water  I  returned  to  the  river,  which  here  almost  doubled  upon  itself. 
I  tried  another  path  and  had  wandered  at  random  for  I  know  not 
how  long  when  my  eye  was  caught  by  a  thatched  roof  an  immense  dis- 
tance away  at  right  angles.  I  dragged  my  sore  feet — they  were  so 
swollen  I  could  not  put  on  my  shoes — for  miles  through  the  cutting 
prairie  grass — only  to  find  an  abandoned  and  ruined  hut !  I  was  about 
to  return  to  the  river  in  despair  when  I  caught  sight  of  another  hovel 
on  a  knoll  a  mile  away.  At  first  this  also  appeared  abandoned,  but 
as  there  were  several  chickens  about  it,  evidently  it  was  inhabited,  a 
fact  verified  by  finding  still  warm  the  ends  of  fagots  over  which 
breakfast  had  been  cooked.  Lifting  the  woven-grass  door  of  that 
half  of  the  house  with  walls,  I  found  two  hammocks  and  a  few  simple 
utensils  inside,  but  not  a  sign  of  anything  edible,  except  the  chickens, 
and  I  had  no  matches.  There  was  not  even  water,  and  I  had  to  take 
a  big  earthenware  jar  down  to  a  swampy  stream  a  quarter  of  a  mile 
away  and  carry  it  back  on  my  head.  Then  I  swung  my  hammock, 
got  into  pajamas,  and  hung  out  everything  to  dry,  determined  to  stay 
there  until  doomsday  rather  than  strike  out  into  the  foodless  unknown 
wastes  again.  I  slept.  A  shower  woke  me  just  in  time  to  snatch  in 
my  clothes.  They  had  been  hung  out  once  more  and  I  was  again 
asleep  when,  about  midday,  I  was  awakened  by  a  rustling  of  the  grass 
door  outside  which  I  hung,  and  looked  up  to  find  a  woman  of  the 
same  dirty,  grouchy,  uncompassionate  type  of  all  those  parts.  I 
asked  her  where  I  was,  and  was  delighted  to  learn,  even  from  so  sour 
an  individual,  that  I  was  barely  a  league  distant  from  the  liato  I  had 
been  trying  to  reach.  The  female  was  returning  there  at  once,  and 
I  cmild  "follow  her  footprints."  There  was  no  getting  her  to  wait 
a  minute  while  I  dressed  and  packed,  and  well  I  knew  my  ability  to 
lose  her  footprints  within  the  first  hundred  yards.  I  did  just  that, 
and  should  have  been  as  badly  off  as  ever,  had  not  a  half -negro  with 
two  babies  appeared  on  a  horse,  followed  by  his  woman  and  older 
daughter  on  foot,  likewise  bound  for  "El  Cardon."  We  waded  two 
swamps,  cutting  up  what  was  left  of  my  feet,  and  when  I  stopped 


622  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

within  sight  of  the  hato  to  wash  them  in  a  stream,  another  sudden 
shower  left  me  dripping  at  every  pore. 

"El  Cardon"  was  a  collection  of  several  mud  houses  in  the  center 
of  a  large  ranch.  As  usual,  the  owner  was  not  at  home,  and  the 
slatternly,  filthy,  moralless  female  in  charge  seemed  to  take  pleasure 
in  my  condition.  Though  the  place  swarmed  with  chickens  and  sev- 
eral other  potential  forms  of  food,  her  stock  answer  to  my  repeated 
offers  to  pay  well  for  one  was  that  lie  I  had  so  often  heard  in  the 
Andes — "Son  ajcnos— they  belong  to  someone  else."  "Well,  sell  me 
anything  to  eat,"  I  urged,  with  as  much  calm  dignity  as  I  could  mus- 
ter under  the  circumstances. 

"I  am  not  the  ov/ner,"  she  invariably  replied,  "and  I  cannot." 

She  could,  of  course,  for  she  was  in  full  charge  of  the  establish- 
ment, but  these  part-Indian  people  of  rural  South  America  probably 
would  enjoy  nothing  more  than  to  see  a  man  die  of  starvation  in  their 
noisome  dooryards.  It  is  the  same  spirit  which  makes  the  Spaniard 
shriek  with  delight  over  a  disemboweled  horse  at  his  bullfights.  It 
cost  me  a  struggle  even  to  get  water.  Here  the  man  with  whom  I 
had  arrived  took  a  hand,  and  at  last  he  got  her  to  open  the  main  room, 
the  only  one  that  was  not  filled  with  fowls,  dogs,  babies,  and  pigs 
rolling  in  their  own  filth,  which  soon  invaded  that  also.  It  was  a 
cement-floored  place  with  only  the  thatched  roof  for  ceiling,  photo- 
graphs of  the  owner  and  his  relatives  in  all  sorts  of  unnatural  pos- 
tures and  some  silly  English  lithographs  of  about  1840  scattered 
around  the  half-washed  walls.  Finally,  at  least  three  hours  later, 
this  same  man  induced  the  stubborn  female  to  serve  me  a  dish  of 
beans  and  rice  with  some  scraps  of  pork  in  it,  such  as  she  fed  twice 
daily  to  the  peons. 

As  the  next  place  was  eighteen  miles  away,  by  a  "road"  I  was 
almost  certain  to  lose,  I  was  stranded  until  I  could  by  hook  or  crook 
get  a  guide  and  food  for  the  journey.  I  had  several  times  bathed 
my  bleeding  feet  and  legs  in  the  only  disinfectant  available,  kerosene, 
w^hich  added  to  the  combined  ache  of  my  countless  lacerations,  while 
to  complete  my  superficial  misery,  swamps,  sun,  and  perspiration'had 
opened  anew  the  half -healed  tropical  ulcers  and  the  wound  above 
one  elbow  where  an  English  bulldog  had  bitten  me  when  I  had  had  the 
audacity  to  attempt  to  deliver  a  letter  of  introduction  on  a  sugar  estate 
in  British  Guiana.  At  length  a  man  theoretically  in  command  of  the  es- 
tablishment arrived  and  after  a  long  argument  I  was  half-promised 
a  guide  for  manana — if  I  would  pay  him  sixty  cents,  that  is,  three 


THE  TRACKLESS  LLANOS  OF  VENEZUELA         623 

days'  wages  at  the  local  scale.  Then  the  woman  whose  hut  I  had 
invaded,  returning  "donde  mi,"  as  the  rural  Venezuelan  calls  his  own 
house,  accepted  forty  cents  for  a  chicken  which  she  might  or  might 
not  send  for  me  to  turn  over  to  the  unsympathetic  female,  who  might 
or  might  not  he  induced  to  cook  it.  The  fowl  came,  however,  and 
died  at  sunset,  so  that  it  was  long  after  dark  when  it  reached  me 
smothered  in  rice  and  none  too  well  done,  though  I  had  difficulty  in 
keeping  enough  of  it  for  the  next  day's  journey.  Another  capatas, 
with  as  little  authority  as  the  other  over  those  supposedly  under  his 
orders,  appeared  and,  with  two  peons,  hung  his  hammock  from  the 
beams  of  the  family  parlor  in  which  I  sat.  For  some  two  hours  they 
swung  back  and  forth  thrumming  rude  guitars  and  singing  impro- 
vised couplets.  Illiterate  and  ignorant  as  they  were,  they  could  alter- 
nate unhesitatingly  with  two-line  rhymes  on  some  local  subject  of 
the  day — such  as  myself  : 

"Y   un   bianco   ha   llega-a-a-o 
Con  los  pies  maltrata-a-a-o." 

These  were  almost  always  spiced  with  some  indecent  reference  to 
women,  about  such  remarks  as  two  stallions  might  make  to  each  other 
in  a  discussion  of  mares,  if  they  had  speech — no,  they  would  be  more 
dignified.  "Nosotros  somos  unos  brntos,"  said  one  of  the  youths, 
who  at  least  had  a  glimmering  of  his  own  ignorance,  rare  in  those 
parts;  but  his  use  of  the  word  "brute"  was  not  what  I  would  have 
given  it.  The  peons  came  twice  after  I  had  retired,  posing  at  least 
as  authorized  go-betweens,  to  ask  whether  I  wished  the  unspeakable 
female  to  share  my  hammock  with  me,  a  favor  which  she  frankly  took 
turns  in  showering  upon  all  the  men  above  the  age  of  fifteen  on  the 
place. 

The  usual  farmyard  chorus  announced  dawn  long  before  it  arrived, 
and  even  when  it  did  come  I  could  not  strike  off  alone  and  unbreak- 
fasted.  But  two  hours  passed  before  the  surly  female  brought  me 
a  cup  of  black  coffee,  and  I  was  about  to  start  alone,  whatever  the 
risk,  when  a  negro  named  Ambrosio  turned  up  and  offered  to  go  with 
me  for  forty  cents.  Guides  are  cheap  enough,  if  only  you  can  get 
them.  The  female  had  stolen  more  than  half  the  chicken  I  had  left 
in  her  charge,  leaving  me  burdened  only  with  three  pieces  of  it.  I 
overcame  Ambrosio's  natural  tendency  to  put  it  off  until  manana  and 
we  struck  down  across  the  hot  plain  to  the  river,  which  we  crossed 
in  an  old  curial  attached  to  a  wire  stretching  from  bank  to  bank,  Am- 


624  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

brosio  carrying  me  ashore  on  his  shoulders — at  my  suggestion — to 
save  me  the  time  and  trouble  of  removing  and  replacing  my  shoes. 
I  also  bluffed  him  into  carrying  the  larger  part  of  my  bundle.  Luck- 
ily, I  had  not  started  alone ;  I  certainly  should  have  lost  the  way 
again.  So  did  Ambrosio,  for  that  matter,  though  like  a  true  Latin- 
American  his  version  of  it  was  "se  ha  perdi'o  el  camino — the  road  has 
lost  itself."  He  was  an  experienced  vaqueano,  however,  and  striking 
across  the  rolling,  loose  sand,  with  some  sidestepping  he  landed  me 
at  noon  in  La  Canoa. 

This  was  a  village  of  several  large  huts  on  a  one-wire  telegraph  line, 
the  principal  one  being  occupied  by  the  part-negro  family  of  the 
telegraph  operator.  Almost  a  real  meal  was  prepared  for  me  while  I 
swung  in  my  hammock  above  the  earth  floor  of  the  sala,  or  "sitting- 
room."  The  toothless  old  lady  with  whom  I  whiled  away  the  delay 
said  it  was  bad  enough  to  live  in  a  region  where  one  could  get  nothing 
to  eat,  but  "the  worst  is  that  when  somebody  dies,  you  can't  even 
buy  candles !"  I  agreed  with  her.  A  wide,  main-traveled  trail,  always 
within  sight  of  the  telegraph  wire,  lay  before  me,  but  there  were 
twelve  miles  to  be  covered  without  a  drop  of  water.  I  had  three 
small  green  lemons,  however,  and  set  my  fastest  pace  until  I  reached 
the  clear  river  near  the  end  of  the  journey,  halting  to  drink  it  half 
dry  before  bathing  and  strolling  up  to  three  miserable  huts  on  a 
knoll  above. 

Here  a  part-Indian  youth  named  Lopez,  with  two  asses  and  a 
mulatto  boy  assistant,  had  also  stopped  for  the  night  on  a  journey 
in  my  direction,  and  as  there  were  thirty  miles  without  water  ahead, 
I  made  myself  simpdtico  in  the  hope  that  we  might  join  forces. 
Neither  for  love  nor  money  could  anything  be  bought  here,  except 
sugar-cane  and  miserable  cassava-bread.  I  consider  my  digestive 
apparatus  above  the  average  in  enduring  hardships,  but  I  felt  it  was 
entitled  to  something  better  than  cold  fried  sawdust  that  evening. 
This  ridiculous  notion  aroused  the  mirth  of  the  natives,  who  gathered 
around  me  prophesying  disaster  while  I  tried  the  eft'ect  of  boiling  a 
few  sheets  of  the  cassava-bread  into  a  kind  of  hot  pudding.  They 
were  right.  The  stuff  tasted  like  wet  calico  and  an  hour  Tater  I  was 
attacked  with  the  worst  case  of  seasickness  I  have  ever  suffered, 
which  lasted  nearly  all  night,  the  earlier  part  of  it  gladdened  by  the 
natives  standing  about  me  doubled  up  with  shrieking  laughter. 

My  breakfast  consisted  of  sucking  a  sugar-cane.  These  people, 
though  not  exactly   savages,  have  the   same   improvidence   and  indo- 


THE  TRACKLESS  ELANOS  OF  VENEZUELA         625 

lence,  not  to  mention  lieartlessness,  and  are  so  lazy  that  they  will 
sit  half-starved  or  kill  themselves  early  by  the  rubbish  they  put  into 
their  stomachs,  rather  than  go  out  and  plant  something.  They  were 
so  lazy  that  there  was  not  a  drop  of  water  in  any  one  of  the  three 
huts  until  some  two  hours  after  the  first  complaint  of  thirst  was 
heard ;  they  live  so  literally  from  hand  to  mouth  that  no  sooner  do 
they  get  a  bean  or  a  grain  of  corn  than  they  eat  it  raw.  Let  anything 
in  edible  form  appear,  and  there  is  a  rush  of  dogs,  pigs,  chickens, 
and  goats  to  dispute  it  with  their  human  companions ;  give  them  meat, 
and  they  will  sit  up  all  night  to  cook  and  devour  it.  never  beginning 
their  preparations  for  the  next  meal  until  everything,  down  to  the 
last  water-jar,  is  empty. 

Lopez  offered  to  put  my  bundle  on  one  of  his  donkeys,  whether 
in  the  hope  of  running  away  with  it  or  from  kindness  mingled  with 
the  expectation  of  a  tip  I  did  not  decide  until  some  time  afterward. 
With  half  the  morning  already  gone,  we  were  off  at  last,  under  a 
blistering  sun,  everything  I  owned,  including  my  money  and  proof 
of  identity,  on  the  burro's  back,  except  my  kodak,  revolver,  and  a 
small  bottle  of  water.  We  had  gone  a  league  when  Lopez  decided 
to  turn  aside  to  the  liato  "La  Pena,"  as  far  off  our  line  of  march, 
and,  still  carrying  the  bottle  of  water,  I  arrived  at  the  same  river 
from  which  I  had  dipped  it  up  and  had  to  shed  shoes  and  trousers  to 
cross  it.  Here  we  squatted  for  hours  in  an  earth-floored  farmhouse 
belonging  to  a  man  who  boasted  possession  of  thousands  of  acres,  yet 
who  dressed  in  rags  and  in  whose  house  there  was  scarcely  a  day's 
rations.  No  wonder  people  living  as  they  do  in  rural  Venezuela  are  only 
too  glad  to  start  a  revolution,  if  only  in  the  hope  of  perhaps  getting 
something  to  eat. 

About  noon  I  discovered  that  we  were  waiting  while  an  ass  that 
was  for  sale  could  be  found.  Whichever  way  I  guessed  on  this  trip, 
I  was  wrong.  I  had  thought  that  by  joining  Lopez  my  progress  would 
be  increased;  already  it  looked  as  if  quite  the  opposite  were  the  case. 
At  last  the  burro  was  found ;  then  he  must  be  caught ;  then  he  proved 
malucho,  which  means  almost  anything  in  Venezuela,  wild,  twisted, 
wrong,  mad,  not  right  in  any  way.  Then  there  ensued  a  long  Ori- 
ental argument  about  the  price,  which  was  finally  settled  at  eighty 
bolivares  ($16.17).  Next  Lopez  must  have  a  document  of  sale  on  a 
sheet  out  of  my  note-book  and  written  with  my  pen — because  there 
was  evidently  not  another  one  in  the  region;  then  he  must  undo  his 
pack  and  take  out  money  enough  in  silver  to  pay  the  price,  after  it 


626  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

had  been  counted  half  a  dozen  times  on  both  sides,  and  three  times 
by  me  as  confirmation,  and  finally,  at  a  fine  hour  to  start  on  a  twenty- 
seven  mile  tramp  across  a  desert  without  w^ater,  food,  or  shelter,  we 
were  off. 

For  the  first  few  miles  it  took  the  combined  exertions  of  the  three 
of  us  to  initiate  the  new  donkey,  who  was  young,  large,  and  strong, 
so  that  by  the  time  we  were  well  out  of  reach  of  the  river  again,  our 
tongues  were  protruding  with  thirst.  Then  we  plodded  unbrokenly 
on,  hour  after  hour  across  a  tinder-dry  desert  of  coarse  tuft-grass 
and  scraggly  trees,  slightly  rolling  in  great  waves,  the  "road"  a  dozen 
untrodden  paths  hidden  in  a  grass  that  tore  viciously  at  our  feet. 
Unless  we  found  a  pozo,  or  hole  in  the  ground,  well  off  the  trail  at 
about  mid-distance,  by  spying  an  extra  insulator  on  the  single  tele- 
graph-wire that  kept  more  or  less  beside  us,  we  would  come  upon 
no  water  during  the  whole  twenty-seven  miles.  I  allowed  myself 
two  swallows  from  my  bottle  at  the  end  of  the  first  blazing  half -hour, 
and  as  many  at  regular  intervals  thereafter,  having  to  share  my 
scanty  supply  with  Lopez.  With  the  typical  improvidence  of  his  race 
he  had  brought  none  with  him,  but  being  a  true  Latin-American,  he 
expected  to  be  protected  by  those  who  had  provided  themselves.  By 
good  luck,  rather  than  for  any  other  reason,  we  did  catch  sight  of 
the  white  knob  on  the  wire  midway  between  two  poles,  and  after 
long  search  found  in  the  immensity  of  the  desert  an  irregular  hole  in 
the  ground  where  water  is  said  to  be  always  clear  and  good.  My 
bottle  filled  again,  but  with  my  maltreated  feet  shrinking  at  every 
step,  we  plodded  on  toward  the  next  water,  fifteen  miles  away.  Dur- 
ing the  last  five  of  them  I  chewed  chicle  incessantly,  and  without  it 
would  probably  have  been  capable  of  drinking  the  blood  of  my  com- 
panions. At  last,  with  dusk  settling  down,  we  sighted  a  good-sized 
house  on  a  ridge,  but  as  this  was  a  telegraph  office,  Lopez  did  not 
wish  to  approach  it,  having  the  lower-class  Venezuelan's  dread  of 
coming  into  unnecessary  contact  with  the  government  in  any  form. 

We  hobbled  on  until  dark,  when  I  caught  sight  of  a  hut  some  dis- 
tance off  the  trail  and  forced  my  tortured  feet  to  carry  me  to  it.  It 
proved  to  be  the  most  miserable  human  dwelling  I  had  yet  seen, 
inhabited  by  a  yellow-negro  male  and  female  without  a  possession  in 
the  world  worth  a  dollar.  There  was  not  a  scrap  of  anything  to 
eat,  no  light,  and  not  even  a  roof  over  most  of  the  house.  But  casu- 
ally, during  the  course  of  the  fixed  formalities  of  greeting,  the  man 
mentioned  that  back  at  the  "office"  where  Lopez  had  refused  to  stop 


THE  TRACKLESS  LLANOS  OF  VENEZUELA        627 

the  weekly  steer  had  just  been  killed!  It  was  the  first  time  since 
leaving  Ciudad  Bolivar  that  there  had  been  a  possibility  of  buying 
meat.  I  offered  tiie  mulatto  a  cash  reward  to  go  back  and  get  me  two 
bolivares  worth,  an  offer  which  he  accepted  with  what  passes  in 
Venezuela  for  alacrity,  first  showing  me  on  the  way  his  "well" — two 
small  holes  in  the  ground  on  the  edge  of  a  morkhal.  There  I  sat 
and  poured  gallons  of  water  on  my  aching  feet,  at  the  same  time 
drinking  my  fill.  Hobbling  back  to  the  hut,  I  had  the  woman  put  on 
the  kettle  at  once,  and  the  water  was  hot  when  the  man  arrived, 
strangely  enough  bringing  what  was  probably  the  whole  forty  cents' 
worth — a  great  slab  of  beef  nearly  two  feet  long.  Unnecessary  de- 
lay being  painful,  I  myself  cut  it  up  and  soon  had  it  stewing.  Mean- 
while I  sent  our  colored  friend  to  a  neighboring  hut  to  buy  papelon, 
which  proved  to  be  my  old  companion  chancaca,  panda,  rapadnra,  or 
crude  sugar  of  solid  form,  in  a  new  disguise.  By  the  time  he  returned 
I  was  drinking  beef  broth,  to  the  astonishment  of  all  beholders,  for 
these  foolish  people,  who  are  always  on  the  verge  of  starvation  and 
ready  to  eat  the  most  unedible  rubbish,  boil  their  beef  and  then  throw 
away  the  broth !  They  seem,  too,  to  prefer  their  miserable  cassava  to 
meat,  though  in  this  case  the  family  was  still  devouring  their  share 
of  the  feast  when  I  turned  in  at  what  must  have  been  near  midnight 
of  a  day  that  I  only  then  recalled  had  been  Sunday. 

The  most  persistent  of  roosters,  a  few  feet  away  from  me,  began 
his  false  report  about  three  and  kept  it  up  unbrokenly  until  daylight 
really  broke.  This  time  we  loaded  the  big  new  donkey,  but  the  sun 
was  well  up  before  we  had  found  and  captured  the  other  two.  The 
old  canvas  cover  of  Lopez'  pack  showed  faintly  the  words  "U.  S. 
Mail,"  but  this  would  have  meant  nothing  to  him,  even  had  I  called 
attention  to  it,  for  geography  is  a  closed  subject  to  the  rural  Vene- 
zuelan. Those  to  whom  I  mentioned  that  I  came  from  the  United 
States  were  sure  to  make  some  such  remark  as,  "Ah,  United  States 
of  Venezuela?" — evidently  thinking  those  two  parts  of  the  same  coun- 
try. Lopez  asked  me  one  day,  in  an  unusual  fit  of  curiosity,  whether 
the  money  he  had  been  using  all  his  life  was  not  minted  in  my  coun- 
try, because  it  said  "Estados  Unidos  de  Venezuela"  on  each  coin. 
He  was  typical  of  the  soul  of  the  common  people  of  that  misruled 
"republic,"  harassed  by  fate,  the  government,  the  climate,  the  diffi- 
culty of  making  the  most  meager  living,  and  his  faint,  almost  uncon- 
scious longing  for  light,  scarcely  daring  to  mention  his  views  on  poli- 
tics even  to  a  footsore  foreigner,  so  dreaded  are  the  tyrants  whose 


628  WORKING  NORTH  FRO^I  PATAGONIA 

names  are  spoken  by  this  class,  if  at  all,  only  in  whispers.  Outwardly 
many  of  their  manners  and  opinions  are  ludicrous,  but  one  comes 
to  learn  that  these  little  brown  people  have  their  own  ego  under  their 
comic-opera  looks  and  actions. 

At  the  very  next  house  we  stopped  for  an  hour  while  Lopez  bar- 
gained for  chinchorros,  his  trade  being  that  of  chinchorrero,  or  buyer 
of  the  grass  hammocks  that  serve  as  beds  to  most  Venezuelans.  Ves- 
pucci found  the  Indians  of  the  Orinoco  sleeping  in  the  tops  of  trees, 
at  least  in  flood  time,  and  named  the  country  "Little  Venice."  Their 
descendants  still  sleep  in  tree-tops,  though  now  woven  into  hammocks. 
ChincJiorros  are  made  of  the  tender  center  leaf  of  the  moriche  palm, 
which  men  and  boys  climb  as  material  is  needed,  turning  it  over  to 
the  weavers,  who  almost  invariably  are  women.  It  is  either  a  fact 
or  a  persistent  superstition  that  the  finer  grade  of  hammocks  can  only 
be  woven  by  women  and  in  the  early  morning  or  late  evening  when  the 
dew  gives  the  air  a  proper  humidity ;  so  at  those  hours  one  may  come 
upon  a  girl  or  matron  at  almost  any  hut  in  this  region  diligently  roll- 
ing the  split  palm-leaves  into  twine  against  her  bare  leg,  for  which 
there  is  believed  to  be  no  effective  substitute.  Whether  both  delusions 
have  not  been  deliberately  nurtured  by  the  men  for  their  own  ad- 
vantage is  at  least  a  reasonable  question. 

The  heavier  and  cheaper  grades  of  hammock,  however,  can  be 
made  under  less  picturesque  conditions,  hence  are  astonishingly  low 
in  price.  At  two  neighboring  huts  Lopez  bought  a  dozen  for  the 
equivalent  of  $7.70,  but  the  sun  was  high  before  they  had  been  paid 
for  and  loaded.  He  hoped  to  sell  them  in  Barcelona  on  the  north 
coast  for  about  $10,  also  the  recruit  donkey  for  a  similar  advance 
over  its  cost.  A  few  miles  beyond  we  crossed  by  a  narrow  pass 
another  great  morichal  and  the  River  Tigre,  where  we  swam  and 
drank  our  fill  in  spite  of  the  prevalence  of  alligators,  for  another 
waterless  nine  leagues  lay  before  us.  In  such  situations  endurance 
depends  mainly  on  the  power  of  detaching  oneself  from  one's  sur- 
roundings, and  I  found  that  by  picturing  to  myself  in  detail  the 
approaching  arrival  home  to  which  I  had  so  long  looked  forward, 
I  could  banish  even  raging  thirst  into  the  dim  background.  Thus 
I  managed  to  plod  fully  half  the  distance  on  my  tortured  feet  before 
opening  my  bottle  of  water.  We  set  the  swiftest  pace  of  which  we 
were  capable  in  order  to  have  the  ordeal  over  as  soon  as  possible, 
but  bit  by  bit  the  water  and  then  the  few  small  green  lemons  we  had 
picked  up  at  the  last  house  were  consumed,  and  still  the  shimmering, 


THE  TRACKLESS  LLANOS  OF  VENEZUELA         629 

withered  desert  crept  up  over  the  horizon.  To  save  my  soles  from 
the  gridirons  of  purgatory  I  could  not  increase  my  pace  in  proportion 
to  my  raging  thirst.  The  sun  beat  down  from  sheer  overhead,  began 
its  decline,  peered  in  under  my  hat-brim,  and  still  the  painful,  choking, 
unbroken  plodding  continued.  Lopez  judged  the  hour  by  his  shadow, 
and  I  by  a  toss  of  the  head  till  the  sunlight  struck  my  eyes,  a  gesture 
that  had  become  second  nature  during  my  long  tramp  through  South 
America.  Yet  there  was  a  fascination  about  traveling  with  these 
primitive  Uancros,  enduring  all  their  hardships,  entering  bit  by  bit 
into  their  taciturn  inner  selves,  to  find  them,  after  all,  different,  yet 
strangely  like  the  generality  of  mankind. 

At  last  there  appeared,  far  ahead,  a  slight  ridge,  at  the  base  of 
which  Lopez  promised  the  River  Guanipa.  As  we  neared  it  two 
horsemen,  the  only  fellow-travelers  we  had  seen  in  days,  called  to 
my  companions  from  under  some  scraggly  trees,  but  I  had  not  their 
aboriginal  endurance  in  the  matter  of  thirst  and  stalked  on  until  I 
could  throw  myself  face  down  at  the  edge  of  the  river.  We  had 
intended  to  push  on  to  Cantaura,  eight  leagues  farther,  but  it  was 
already  mid-afternoon,  we  were  sore  and  weary,  and  there  was 
unlimited  water  close  at  hand.  Moreover,  the  horsemen,  with  whom 
I  found  Lopez  hobnobbing  when  I  hobbled  back,  reported  that  a 
"revolution"  was  raging  in  Cantaura. 

The  day  before,  three  hundred  bandits,  or  patriots,  according  to 
the  political  affiliations  of  the  speaker,  had  taken  captive  the  local 
government,  looted  the  shops,  and  were  now  camped  on  the  edge  of 
town.  It  was  admitted  that  they  were  unlikely  to  molest  foreigners; 
the  ordinary  citizen,  in  fact,  is  httle  affected  by  such  "revolutions," 
carried  on  by  a  small  part  of  the  population  and  disturbing  the  general 
stream  of  life  less  than  do  our  presidential  elections.  But  there  was 
a  possibility  that  the  band  might  need  hammocks,  or  even  wish  to  add 
to  their  ranks  so  lusty  a  youth  as  Lopez.  We  therefore  swung  our 
chinchorros  under  the  scrub  trees,  which  gave  time  not  only  for  a 
swim  but  for  a  general  laundering  and,  most  important  of  all,  a  chance 
to  nurse  my  lacerated  feet.  Our  new  companions  were  white  enough 
to  pass  for  Americans,  yet  they  were  as  ignorant  of  anything  outside 
their  immediate  environment  as  jungle  savages.  They  did  not  know, 
for  instance,  that  water  separated  their  country  from  the  warring 
"towns,"  as  they  called  them,  of  Europe — which  they  took  to  be  a 
single  small  country  from  which  came  all  "gringos,"  or  white 
foreigners.     To  tliem  the  great  war  of  which  they  had  heard   faint 


630  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

rumors  was  merely  another  "revolution"  similar  to  the  one  in  the 
nearby  village;  yet  it  was  plain  that,  for  all  these  frequent  uprisings 
instigated  by  ambitious  leaders,  the  Venezuelan  country  people  were 
as  peace-loving  as  they  are,  like  Spanish  peasants,  intelligent  even 
though  illiterate. 

With  water  at  hand  and  a  cool  breeze  sweeping  across  the  sandy 
plains,  I  looked  forward  to  a  comfortable  night  at  last.  But  it  was 
the  first  one  in  Venezuela  when  mosquitoes  and  gnats  made  me  regret 
abandoning  my  mosquitero;  moreover,  Lopez,  having  decided  to  push  on 
at  midnight,  spent  the  interval  incessantly  chattering  with  his  new 
friends,  the  conversation  consisting  mainly  of  a  similar  but  much 
stronger  expletive  than  "Caramba!"  At  midnight  he  decided  to  go 
later,  when  the  stars  came  out,  and  renewed  the  profane  prattle; 
then  we  could  not  find  one  of  the  donkeys,  and  I  got  at  last  a  little 
sleep.  When  I  awoke  the  stars  had  abandoned  the  sky  and  the  birds 
in  the  trees  were  beginning  to  twitter.  There  was  a  classical  sunrise 
that  morning,  for  the  rays  streamed  out  fanshape  on  the  clouds,  as 
from  the  throne  of  God  in  old  religious  paintings,  no  doubt  modeled 
from  this  very  phenomenon  of  nature.  Long  after  this  was  dissi- 
pated, we  were  still  wandering  the  countryside,  looking  for  the  lost 
donkey.  When  at  last  we  were  off,  I  had  not  finished  redressing 
my  tender  feet  after  fording  the  river  before  we  got  a  "palo  d'agua," 
a  sudden  heavy  shower  that  drenched  us  through  and  through.  In 
the  unlady-like  words  of  my  companions  something  or  other  was 
always  "echando  una  vaina,"  which  is  the  nearest  Venezuelan  equiva- 
lent to  "raising  hell." 

We  marched  four  leagues  in  sand  and  cutting  grass,  with  muddy 
pools  to  wade  here  and  there,  all  very  slowly  because  a  sick  donkey 
was  unable  to  keep  a  fast  pace,  even  though  "stark  naked."  I  arrived, 
therefore,  at  a  sluggish  river  in  time  to  swim  and  get  dressed  again 
before  the  others  overtook  me;  but  here  Lopez  left  his  negro 
assistant  to  bring  in  the  ailing  burro,  and  we  covered  at  our  old  pace 
the  four  leagues  remaining.  The  country  changed  completely  from 
sandy  llano  to  stony  hills,  in  which  a  well-marked  road  cut  zigzags. 
Worn,  hot,  and  hungry,  we  came  in  the  early  afternoon  to  Cantaura, 
a  flat,  quadrangular,  silent  town  in  sand  and  weeds,  of  several  thou- 
sand inhabitants.  There  were  five  by  seven  solid  blocks  of  mud 
houses,  every  corner  one  a  shop  with  the  counter  aslant  it  and  scanty 
custom  or  stock-in-trade.  It  was  an  incredibly  languid  town,  much 
given  to  the  crime  of  bringing  into  the  world  children  who  could  not 


THE  TRACKLESS  LLANOS  OF  VENEZUELA        631 

be  properly  cared  for,  so  that  no  woman  who  could  by  hook  or  crook 
have  an  infant  in  arms  was  without  one,  and  they  swarmed  every- 
where in  spite  of  a  naturally,  perhaps  fortunately,  high  death  rate. 
In  fact,  it  was  incredible  how  many  human  beings  were  vegetating 
here,  doing  nothing  but  a  little  apathetic  shopkeeping  and  hammock- 
making,  with  the  silence   and   inertia   of   the  grave   over   everything. 

All  sorts  of  odds  and  ends  of  humanity  were  tucked  away  in  the 
rambling  old  adobe  houses,  in  one  of  which  we  at  once  made  ourselves 
at  home,  tethering  the  donkeys  in  a  patio  filled  with  weeds  and  bush, 
and  swinging  our  hammocks  in  the  monasterial  old  corrector  sur- 
rounding it.  Here  we  gave  the  slatternly  woman  of  the  house  thirty 
cents  with  which  to  buy  beef  and  rice  and  make  us  a  stew,  she  no  more 
thinking  of  charging  us  for  the  cooking  than  for  room  to  hang  our 
chinchorros.  Eggs  were  three  for  five  cents;  a  large  corn  biscuit, 
or  pan  de  arepa,  was  one  cent;  "wheat  bread,"  as  a  tiny,  dry  ring  of 
baked  flour  of  the  size  and  shape  of  a  bracelet  was  called,  cost  some- 
thing more  than  that;  native  cheese,  papelon,  even  milk,  though  prob- 
ably from  goats  and  certainly  boiled,  could  be  had  by  persons  of 
wealth.  It  was  not  long  after  our  arrival,  therefore,  that  Lopez  and 
I  might  have  been  seen  squatting  beside  a  makeshift  table,  eating  in 
a  Lord-knows-when-I  '11-get-another-meal  manner,  with  a  crowd  of 
dirty  women  and  children  hovering  about  us  and  the  kitchen,  waiting  to 
snatch  any  scraps  we  might  leave.  One  of  the  former  passed  the 
time  by  feeding  black  coffee  to  a  hollow-eyed  baby  some  eight  months 
old.  These  people  disregard  the  most  commonplace  principles  of 
health,  wealth,  and  marriage — though  certainly  not  with  impunity. 
The  town  had  no  water  supply  except  a  sluggish  creek  two  miles 
away,  to  which  I  had  been  forced  to  hobble  even  to  wash  my  hands. 
Asses  brought  two  small  barrels  of  it  to  a  house  for  five  cents,  but 
even  they  were  lazy,  and  many  people  had  no  such  sum,  so  that  not 
only  do  the  people  almost  never  wash,  but  a  thirsty  man  must  often 
canvass  several  families  before  he  gets  a  drink  of  water  in  which 
newly  dug  potatoes  appear  to  have  been  soaked.  Like  the  political 
atrocities  which  long  experience  has  made  seem  unavoidable,  these 
torpid  people  endured  these  things  without  complaint  or  the  thought 
of  a  possible  remedy. 

The  "revolution"  two  days  before  had  been  much  less  serious  than 
the  telegraph,  a  strictly  government  organ,  had  reported  to  the  outside 
w^orld.  It  was  the  first  anniversary  of  the  organizing  of  a  revolt 
against  the  national  tyrant  bv  a  man  highly   favored  in  this  region 


632  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

by  all  except  the  political  powers.  That  date  had  to  be  celebrated 
by  a  "gesture"  that  would  be  heard  even  in  Caracas ;  besides,  the 
revolutionists  were  hungry.  On  the  other  hand,  they  did  not  wish 
to  antagonize  the  generally  friendly  metropolis  of  Cantaura.  The 
three  hundred,  therefore,  had  camped  nearby  and  sent  a  delegation 
of  thirty  men  into  the  town,  to  take  the  gobcrnador  prisoner — merely 
as  a  sign  of  disdain  to  the  hated  tyrant  who  had  appointed  him,  for 
that  evening  he  was  released  at  his  own  hato.  No  shot  had  been 
fired,  all  food  had  been  paid  for,  and  nothing  stolen.  It  is  not  the 
revolutionists  whom  the  people  of  the  llanos  fear,  but  the  government 
soldiers,  who  enter  houses,  attack  women,  and  carry  off  anything 
that  takes  tlieir  fancy.  In  Venezuela  the  government  picks  up  men 
of  the  lower  classes  wherever  it  can  find  them  and  impresses  them  into 
the  army.  It  is  not  only  the  favorite  depository  for  criminals,  but 
fully  two  thirds  of  their  thirty  cents  a  day  is  stolen  from  the  soldiers 
by  those  higher  up,  hence,  though  they  are  rarely  men  enough  to 
revolt  against  their  oppressors,  they  are  quick  to  pass  their  mis- 
fortunes on  to  the  population.  In  this  case,  as  in  many  others,  the 
knightly  deportment  of  the  revolutionary  leader  was  not  matched  by 
the  tyrant  in  power,  for  less  than  a  fortnight  later  he  and  a  score 
of  his  staff  were  given  no  quarter  when  the  government  troops 
surrounded  them. 

Lopez  bought  four  dozen  more  hammocks  in  Cantaura,  and  I  a 
bag  of  food  to  share  with  him  in  return  for  the  privilege  of  loading 
it  on  one  of  his  donkeys,  though  the  favor  would  have  been  granted 
me  in  any  case,  for  I  had  gradually  found  that  there  was  a  moderately 
kind  heart  beneath  the  taciturn,  part-Indian  exterior  of  the  chin- 
cJiorrcro.  An  older  man  in  the  selfsame  two-piece  cotton  garments, 
peaked  hat  of  coarsest  straw,  and  bare  feet  thrust  into  cowhide 
sandals,  had  joined  us,  making  our  party  four  men  and  as  many 
donkeys.  We  plunged  at  once  into  a  country  quite  different  from 
that  I  had  so  far  seen,  becoming  involved  in  a  series  of  foothills 
which  gradually  rose  higher  and  higher  until  the  ranges  seemed  to 
be  climbing  pellmell  one  over  another  in  a  vain  effort  to  escape  some 
unseen  terror.  They  were  covered  with  thick  woods,  and  at  first 
the  well-marked  trail  of  hard  earth  promised  comfortable,  shady 
going;  but  soon  that  other  curse  of  the  foot-traveler  descended  in 
torrents  that  almost  made  the  drought  of  bygone  days  seem  prefer- 
able. Pounds  of  mud  clung  to  every  step ;  the  earth  grasped  the 
heels  of  my  low  shoes  as  in  a  clamp,  requiring  the  full  force  of  each 


THE  TRACKLESS  LLANOS  OF  VENEZUELA        633 

leg  to  set  it  before  the  other.  I  dared  not  drop  behind ;  hickily,  the 
others  could  not  go  much  faster  than  I,  their  only  advantage  being 
that  they  could  wash  their  bare  feet  or  sandals  in  any  stream  without 
stopping,  while  I  must  carry  the  mud  on. 

Toward  noon  the  country  opened  out  once  more,  with  fewer  woods 
and  lower  hills,  and  we  were  dry  again  by  the  time  we  finished  the 
day's  toil  at  a  weed-hidden  village.  The  next  night's  stopping-place 
was,  I  believe,  the  most  horrible  in  all  South  America.  Two  old  huts 
covered  with  ancient  reeds  and  completely  surrounded,  inside  and  out, 
with  every  filth  of  man  and  beast,  were  inhabited  by  a  fully  white 
and  well  formed  man,  who  stumped  about  on  legs  completely  hidden 
under  many  layers  of  the  foulest  contamination.  This  had  invaded 
everything,  including  the  slatternly  blond  motiier  and  her  half-dozen 
of  what  seemed  beneath  the  mire  to  be  tow-headed  children,  the  whole 
family  rapidly  going  blind  from  some  disease  resembling  ophthalmia. 
Yet  they  seemed  to  have  no  inkling  of  their  abominations.  The  man 
chattered  politics  as  if  he  might  at  any  moment  be  called  to  the 
presidency  and  handed  me  a  foul  liquid  as  if  it  were  the  finest 
drinking  water.  The  next  day  was  laborious,  though  not  thirsty, 
Lopez  leading  the  way  along  single-file  paths  and  short  cuts  over  hill 
and  dale  through  dense  low  woods.  Now  and  then  we  broke  out 
upon  a  hot,  bare  stretch,  w4iere  my  companions  sometimes  threw 
themselves  face-down  to  drink  liquid  mud  from  some  hollow  in  the 
ground.  During  the  afternoon  the  "road"  was  full  of  loose  rocks 
of  all  sizes,  which  tortured  my  maltreated  feet  almost  beyond  en- 
durance. We  reached  the  mud  village  of  Caripe  before  sunset,  but 
Lopez  had  relatives  farther  on,  so  we  followed  the  "camino  real" 
and  a  telegraph  wire  for  several  more  toilsome,  up-and-down  miles, 
the  hammock-buyer  now  and  then  repeating  a  cheerful,  "We  are  almost 
at  the  door  of  the  house."  Presently  we  left  the  main  trail  and 
plunged  off  into  the  wet,  black,  silent  night,  through  hilly  woods  and 
head-high  weeds,  through  knee-deep  mud-holes  and  past  frog-chanting 
lagoons,  to  come  at  last  upon  two  miserable  huts  swarming  with 
gaunt  and  savage  curs  and  harboring  vociferous,  unwashed  people 
without  number.  They  gave  me  scant  greeting,  and  when  I  insisted 
on  having  something  hot  to  eat  for  the  first  time  in  three  days,  Lopez 
explained  that  my  stomach  was  "delicate."  By  admitting  this  calumny 
I  obtained  a  soup  made  of  two  eggs,  after  which  seven  of  us  men 
swung  our  hammocks  in  the  open-pole  kitchen.  Water  was  so  scarce 
that  I  had  to  wait  until  all  the  others  were  audibly  asleep  before 


634  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

filching  two  tiny  canfuls  from  the  mouldy  kitchen  jar  to  pour  on  my 
burning,  itching  feet  and  legs. 

Being  now  only  four  leagues  from  his  native  El  Pilar,  Lopez  left 
his  hammocks  and  asses  to  be  brought  in  by  the  others,  and  saddHng 
the  new  donkey,  which  he  had  reduced  in  a  week  from  a  fine  animrJ 
to  a  wreck,  and  putting  on  a  five-dollar  velour  sombrero  for  which 
he  had  spent  in  Ciudad  Bolivar  his  earnings  on  the  trip  before  he 
earned  them,  he  rode  away  through  the  wet,  early  morning  w'oods 
almost  faster  than  I  could  limp  along  behind  him.  But  his  plan  of 
making  a  triumphal  entry  into  his  native  town  met  with  poor  success. 
The  trail  was  so  rough  and  rocky,  so  up  and  down  and  hot  and 
endless,  that  the  animal  all  but  dropped,  and  Lopez  had  to  get  off 
and  drive  him.  Such  was  his  haste  to  get  home  that  I  should  cer- 
tainly have  been  left  far  behind  had  he  not  every  little  while  met  a 
friend  on  a  donkey  or  a  horse  and  paused  to  give  him  the  limp 
greeting  customary  to  the  region  and  to  exchange  the  latest  local 
gossip.  The  invariable  term  of  endearment  was  "chico,"  rather  than 
the  "che"  of  the  southern  end  of  the  continent,  and  to  every  man 
he  met  during  this  last  part  of  the  journey  Lopez  gave  the  mild  abrazo 
of  rural  Venezuelans,  who  do  not  shake  hands,  but  stand  at  arm's 
length  and  touch  each  other  on  the  shoulder.  Finally  we  got  into 
a  pocket  of  heavily  wooded,  low  hills,  everywhere  choked  with  weeds, 
though  there  were  some  cornfields,  the  ears  broken  half  off  and  left 
hanging  to  ripen.  When  it  appeared  at  last  amid  such  surroundings, 
El  Pilar  proved  to  be  the  usual  collection  of  ancient  and  decrepit 
mud  huts  set  in  a  tangle  of  jungle  and  weeds.  Just  at  the  edge  of 
town  Lopez  mounted,  and  with  his  new  velour  hat  set  at  a  rakish 
angle  and  his  bare  feet  armed  with  cruel  spurs,  to  say  nothing  of 
the  cudgel  in  his  hand,  he  forced  the  gaunt  and  wornout  donkey  to 
prance  into  town  like  an  army  charger.  But  again  his  plans  came 
to  grief.  For  the  misused  brute,  not  being  accustomed  to  the  roar 
and  hubbub  of  towns,  effectually  balked,  and  for  a  hot  and  sweaty 
half  hour  the  returning  hammock-buyer  had  the  ignominious  task  of 
beating,  pushing,  dragging,  and  cudgeling  the  animal  through  the 
gaping  village  to  his  own  house,  I  meanwhile  being  reduced  to  the 
necessity  of  carrying  my   own  bundle. 

During  the  journey  Lopez  had  never  failed  to  raise  his  ragged 
straw  hat  whenever  he  passed  any  of  those  crude  shrines  that  mark 
the  last  resting-place  of  those  of  his  fellow-travelers  who  have  suc- 
cumbed to  the  perils  of  the  llanos  trails;  and  he  had  been  diligent  in 


THE  TRACKLESS  LLANOS  OF  VENEZUELA         635 

keeping  in  constant  sight  a  charm  in  the  form  of  an  embroidered  red 
heart  worn  about  his  neck.  Now  it  was  evident  that  he  had  reached 
home  and  that  danger  was  over,  for  he  hung  the  charm  carelessly 
on  the  adobe  wall,  and  passed  the  local  cemetery  without  so  much 
as  noticing  it,  though  his  parents  and  grandparents  lay  buried  there. 
He  lived  with  several  sisters  and  a  brother  in  the  usual  mud  hut 
opening  on  a  baked  mud  yard,  with  an  open-pole  kitchen  in  which 
even  stray  pigs  were  not  considered  out  of  place ;  but  at  least  his 
sisters  were  quiet  and  outwardly  cleanly,  almost  attractive,  and  when 
Lopez,  with  a  princely  gesture,  threw  a  peso  down  before  them  and 
commanded  "a  huge  hot  meal,"  such  as  he  had  learned  would  win 
my  approval,  they  obeyed  his  orders  almost  with  alacrity.  Mean- 
while I  went  up  into  the  woods  to  a  stream  that  had  left  pools  of 
clear  water  among  rocks,  and  sitting  down  with  a  calabash,  poured 
it  over  me  like  a  Hindu  performing  his  sacred  ablutions  at  Benares. 
I  was  probably  more  soiled  and  ragged  than  I  had  ever  been  m  a 
long  career  of  vagabondage,  but  at  least  this  promised  to  be  the  last 
South  American  mud  village  in  which  I  should  ever  sleep.  When  I 
had  put  on  my  newly  washed  pajamas  and  hobbled  back  to  the  house, 
a  great  chicken-stew  awaited  us.  Lopez  and  I  made  entirely  away 
with  it,  together  with  a  kind  of  baked  squash  and  several  arc  pas; 
and  when  it  casually  leaked  out  that  eggs  cost  one  cent  each  in  El 
Pilar,  I  produced  a  bolivar  with  the  request  to  get  me  twenty  of  them, 
half  of  which  I  shared  with  Lopez,  while  ordering  the  rest  prepared 
for  supper  and  breakfast.  When,  in  addition  to  all  this,  we  did 
away  with  a  whole  watermelon,  the  wonder  of  the  family  and  the 
village  was  complete.  Having  taught  the  hammock-buyer  the  mean- 
ing of  a  real  meal,  I  assumed  for  a  moment  the  unaccustomed  role  of 
missionary  and  strove  to  show  his  relatives  why  their  customary  diet, 
with  its  miserable  coarse  cassava  and  stone-cold  arcpas,  was  not 
conducive  to  longevity. 

"Now  I  am  a  dozen  years  older  than  Lopez."  I  began. 

"Impossible !''  interrupted  his  sisters,  looking  from  his  face  to  mine. 

"Yet  both  his  father  and  mother,  like  the  fathers  and  mothers  of 
many  countrymen  of  Venezuela  as  young  as  he,  have  been  dead  and 
gone  for  years." 

"And  yours?"  inquired  the  girls. 

"Still  quite  young  and  lively,  thank  you,"  I  replied;  "and  my  grand- 
father .  .  ." 

"What — your  (/ro nrf father  !"  cried  the  astounded  family  of  El  Pilar. 


636  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

The  peep  of  dawn  saw  me  bidding  Lopez  farewell — and  promising 
to  send  him  dozens  of  the  many  photographs  the  family  had  insisted 
on  my  taking,  or  pretending  to  take,  of  them.  I  led  the  sun  by  more 
than  an  hour  into  the  jungle  valley  through  which  a  stony  and 
mountainous  trail  lifted  me  to  a  summit,  where,  across  wave  after 
wave  of  blue  wooded  hills,  appeared  the  Caribbean,  as  a  signal  that 
I  had  at  last  walked  South  America  off  the  map.  Huts  were  fairly 
thick  among  hills  that  grew  ever  lower  and  then  less  stony,  the  way 
several  times  following  the  gravelly  beds  of  dry  streams,  until  at  last 
it  broke  out  upon  a  perfectly  level  flat  country  of  cactus  and  dry, 
thorny  bush.  Here  there  was  for  a  long  time  total  silence,  except 
for  the  wail  of  the  mourning  dove,  so  characteristic  a  sound  in  this 
sort  of  landscape.  Then  abruptly,  without  warning,  I  emerged  upon 
an  absolute  desert,  bare  and  sandy  looking  as  the  Sahara.  Instead 
of  the  deep  sand  I  expected,  however,  the  soil  proved  to  be  mud-flats, 
now  dried  and  checkered  in  the  sun,  and  good  smooth  going,  with 
a  telegraph  wire  for  guide — though  a  bit  of  rain  would  have  made 
it  almost  impassable.  Soon  I  was  surprised  to  hear  the  roar  oi 
breakers,  and  when  I  was  high  enough  to  look  over  a  sort  of  natural 
sand  dike,  there  lay  the  whole  blue  Caribbean,  with  what  I  had  taken 
for  another  range  of  hills  rising  out  of  it  in  the  form  of  rocky  islands 
— and,  confound  my  luck  if,  hull-down  on  the  horizon  and  spitting 
black  smoke  scornfully  back  at  me,  there  was  not  a  steamer  racing 
in  full  speed  in  the  direction  of  La  Guayra ! 

The  mud-flats  alternated  now  and  then  with  deep  sand  or  patches 
of  thorny  bush  and  cactus,  a  most  miserable  setting  for  what  I  at 
last  made  out  to  be  the  church-towers  of  Barcelona,  fifth  or  sixth 
city  of  Venezuela,  with  some  15,000  apathetic  inhabitants.  But  as  if 
fate  would  give  me  one  last  slap  before  we  parted,  an  arm  of  the  sea 
appeared  when  I  was  almost  inside  the  city  and  drove  me  and  the 
trail  miles  back  into  the  thirsty  bush,  scrambling  through  cactus, 
springing  across  mud-holes,  forever  limping  painfully  onward.  Then  at 
last  I  emerged  upon  a  cement  sidewalk  on  an  otherwise  dirty,  tumble- 
down, earth-floored  town  of  flat  gridiron  formation,  inhabited  by  a 
ragged  and  uninteresting  population  conspicuously  Latin-American  in 
all  its  manifestations,  even  to  striking,  upon  the  appearance  of  a 
stranger,  an  attitude  in  which  to  enjoy  so  rare  a  sight  at  ease  and 
to  the  full  as  long  as  he  remained  visible. 

It  was  evident  that  my  luck,  if  I  ever  had  any,  had  completely 
deserted  me.     Six  hours  before  my  arrival,  the  lonely  little  train  of 


THE  TRACKLESS  LLANOS  OF  VEx\EZUELA         637 

Barcelona  had  left  for  Huanta,  whence  the  steamship  Manzanarcs 
would  have  set  me  down  in  La  Guayra  the  next  morning  at  a  cost  of 
thirteen  bolivar cs.  Now,  thanks  to  that  half  day  of  loafing  in  El 
Pilar,  I  might  wait  two  or  three  weeks  for  another  steamer.  There 
were,  to  be  sure,  small  freight-carrying  sailboats  advertised  to  leave 
from  time  to  time ;  but  their  agents  in  Barcelona  seemed  to  have  little 
interest  in  passengers,  particularly  a  mere  "gringo."  For  two  days 
I  pursued  captains  of  such  craft  from  rosy  dawn  to  the  last  note  of 
the  evening  concert  in  the  central  plaza,  with  no  other  gain  than  the 
rather  sullen  information  that  there  might  be  a  boat  leaving  manana. 
Meanwhile  my  slender  funds  were  going  for  corn-bread,  and  my 
patience  w^as  oozing  away  in  the  monotony  of  the  sand-paved,  donkey- 
gaited  mud  town  where  not  even  a  book  was  to  be  had.  Then  one 
morning  the  captain  of  the  sailboat  Jose  fit  a  agreed  to  let  me  sit  on 
his  deck  from  Huanta  to  La  Guayra  for  only  twice  the  steamer  fare, 
and  I  bumped  away  in  the  ridiculous  little  train  to  a  port  consisting 
mainly  of  mud  huts,  cocoanut-trees,  and  an  elaborate  stone  custom- 
house. Here  a  long  formality  and  the  payment  of  half  a  dozen 
government  fees  were  required  for  a  "permission  to  embark" — from 
one  miserable  port  to  another  of  the  same  country — and  I  was  ready 
to  intrust  my  future  existence  to  the  equally  capricious  ocean  winds 
and  Venezuelan  temperament. 

The  Josefita  was  a  large  covered  rowboat  with  a  sail,  on  which  was 
painted  in  huge  figures  the  number  required  by  Venezuelan  law  on 
all  such  craft.  The  captain  took  on  a  few  extra  beans  for  the  benefit 
of  his  solitary  passenger;  but  I  played  safe  by  tilling  my  own  sack 
with  corn-buns,  native  cheese,  and  papclSn,  and  by  some  stroke  of  luck 
I  picked  up  a  Spanish  translation  of  Paul  de  Kock  with  which  to 
pass  the  time.  Besides  the  captain  and  myself  there  were  four 
ragged  sailors,  neither  old  nor  young,  and,  strangely  enough,  wholly 
free  from  African  taint.  We  were  loaded  with  a  few  hundred  native 
cheeses  in  banana-leaf  wrappings  when  we  began  crawling  across  the 
bay  to  take  on  mineral  water  at  Lajita.  A  rocky,  half-perpendicular 
coast  with  scanty  tufts  of  green  vegetation  sloped  down  into  the  blue 
Caribbean  in  which  I  trailed  my  rapidly  healing  feet.  At  four  o'clock 
we  drifted  up  to  a  beach  and  a  thatched  village  that  we  seemed  to 
have  passed  by  train  that  morning,  where  we  anchored  while  the 
captain  and  half  the  crew  rowed  ashore.  There  they  were  gone  for 
hours,  evidently  helping  nature  run  down  the  mineral  water,  for 
toward  sunset  there  came  from  the  land  the  sound  of  boxes  being 


638  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

nailed  up.  Meanwhile  nature  had  produced  considerable  water  on 
her  own  account  in  a  long  series  of  thunder-showers  that  fell  with 
an  abrupt  whispering  sound  all  around  the  boat.  Most  of  this  delay 
I  spent  swimming  over  the  side,  trusting  to  my  eyes  to  detect  in  time 
any  sharp-toothed  danger  in  the  clear,  azure  sea,  then  retired  to  the 
tiny  cockpit,  where  the  so-called  cook  brought  me  a  plate  of  plain  rice 
and,  evidently  as  a  special  concession  to  first-class  passengers,  the 
front  end  of  a  boiled  fish. 

When  the  sun  burned  out  again  through  the  mists,  we  were  speeding 
along  in  a  spanking  breeze  after  a  night  in  which  a  heavy  sea  had 
tossed  us  constantly  back  and  forth  on  the  stone-hard  deck,  shipping 
water  to  soak  us  wherever  the  rain  had  not  done  so  already.     Lest  we 
might  have  dozed  in  spite  of  all  this,  the  ragamuffin  at  the  wheel  had 
broken  forth  every  five  minutes  in  a  howling  wail  of  extemporized 
"song"  which  was  meant  to  encourage  the  wind  and  perhaps  to  scare 
off  the  evil  spirits  that  ride  the  darkness.     The  wind  soon  died,  how- 
ever, and  at  noon  we  were  still  flapping  with  idle  canvas  in  a  calm, 
unbroken  sea.     The  book  I  had  picked  up  was  too  silly  for  words; 
my   five   companions    were   utterly    devoid    of    human   interest;    our 
miserable  fare,  concocted  by  a  "cook"  who  did  not  know  enough  to 
boil  water,  was  strongly  scented  with  kerosene;  and  most  of  the  day 
was  spent  in  a  dispute  between  the  captain  and  the  singing  sailor, 
who,  it  seemed,  could  not  read  the  compass  and  had  taken  us  far 
out  to  sea,  when  our  safety  depended  on  keeping  within  sight  of  land. 
The  crew  had  almost  nothing  to  do  but  tack  two  or  three  times  a 
day,  and  spent  the  rest  of  the  time  sleeping  on  the  bare  deck,  except 
the  cook  and  steersmen,  who  were  lazily  engaged  at  their  tasks  most 
of  the  time.    The  sea,  of  the  deepest  possible  blue,  as  if  all  the  indigo 
trees  of  the  tropics  had  spilled  their  product  into  it,  rose  and  sank 
in  its  endless  unrest  without  our  advancing  a  yard.     Well  on  in  the 
afternoon  a  puffing  breeze  developed,  and  on  the  far  port  horizon 
appeared  a  few  stenciled  mountains.     Gradually  we  drew  near  enough 
to  see  that  they  were  clothed  with  forest  to  the  very  sea's  edge.    With 
anything   like   a    fair   wind   we   could    have   made    La    Guayra   that 
evening,    but    the   breeze    was    genuinely   Venezuelan.     At    sunset    a 
school  of  dolphins  surrounded  the  boat  so  closely  as  almost  to  graze 
its  sides,  and  for  an  hour  indulged  in  athletic  feats,  like  a  crowd  of 
schoolboys  showing  off,  not  only  diving  entirely  out  of  water  so  near 
that  we  could  almost  have  put  out  a  hand  and  touched   them,  but 
giving  themselves  two,  and  even  three,   complete  whirling  turns  in 


THE  TRACKLESS  LLANOS  OF  VENEZUELA         639 

the  air,  like  somersaulting  circus  performers,  before  falling  back  into 
the  sea  witii  a  mighty  splash. 

Dawn  found  us  crawling  close  along  a  shore  of  sheer  bush-grown 
mountains  lost  in  low  clouds,  lame  with  constant  rolling  on  the  hard 
deck  and  disgusted  with  the  monotony  of  existence.  With  La  Guayra 
almost  in  sight  at  the  far  point  of  this  range,  called  the  Silla  de 
Caracas,  we  tacked  all  morning  against  a  head  wind  without  seeming 
to  advance  a  foot  along  the  roaring  rocky  mountain  wall.  Life  on 
the  ocean  wave  may  sound  romantic  on  paper,  but  in  a  dirty  and 
hungr>'  sailboat  off  the  coast  of  Venezuela  it  calls  for  other  descriptive 
adjectives.  No  doubt  I  needed  this  final,  post-graduate  course  in 
patience  before  leaving  a  patience-training  continent.  Once  we 
anchored  to  keep  from  losing  the  little  we  had  gained,  and  all  day 
and  the  following  night  we  rolled  and  tossed  in  the  selfsame  spot, 
the  man  at  the  rudder  trying  alternately  to  charm  the  wind  with  his 
raucous  voice  and  to  scare  it  into  motion  with  a  vociferous  "Viento 
sinvergiienza,  caramha!"  Now  and  then  during  tiie  night  the  snap- 
ping of  canvas  and  the  rattling  of  blocks  above  gave  the  sensation 
that  we  were  really  moving  at  last,  but  when  morning  broke  we  were 
off  the  very  rock  beside  which  we  had  lain  down  the  night  before. 
Gradually,  however,  the  breeze  increased  with  the  rising  sun,  and  we 
began  to  move  swiftly  through  the  water;  but  so  strong  is  the 
current  along  this  coast  that  we  seemed  to  remain  for  hours  opposite 
identically  the  same  peak  of  the  Sierra  de  Avila.  Then  we  rolled 
for  hours  within  plain  sight  of  La  Guayra  in  a  sea  as  flat  as  if  oil 
had  been  poured  on  it,  without  even  a  man  at  the  rudder,  so  hopeless 
was  everyone  on  board.  I  had  nothing  to  read ;  there  was  not  a  foot 
of  space  in  which  to  walk;  I  could  not  swim  because  of  sharks; 
there  was  not  a  person  of  intelligence  within  sound  of  my  voice ;  even 
our  miserable  food  was  virtually  gone ;  there  was  only  a  bit  of  filthy, 
lukewarm  water,  full  of  all  sorts  of  sediment,  at  the  bottom  of  the 
barrel,  and  still  we  flopped  motionless  on  a  windless  sea  under  a 
grilling  sun.  I  understood  at  la.st  what  it  means  to  get  oneself  into 
a  boat. 

By  taking  advantage  of  every  faintest  pufT  of  breeze,  our  leather- 
faced  old  sah  coaxed  us  along  during  the  afternoon,  until  a  stiffening 
wind  overtook  us  at  last  and  we  slipped  ever  more  rapidly  along  the 
great  mountain  wall.  Tiny  villages  here  and  there  clung  far  up  on 
little  knobs  of  land;  great  shadowy  valleys  and  sun-defying  corners; 
a  town  here  and  there  along  the  base,  all  seemed  to  bake  in  the  tropical 


640  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

sun.  and  certainly  to  sleep.  By  four  o'clock  La  Guayra  lay  before  us, 
its  bathing  resort  of  Macuto  just  off  our  port  beam;  yet  so  Venezuelan 
was  the  wind  that  we  did  not  know  whether  we  could  reach  harbor 
in  time  to  be  allowed  ashore.  I  might  have  landed  and  walked  into 
town  long  since,  were  it  not  illegal  for  passengers  to  enter  Venezuela 
except  at  a  regular  port  with  a  customhouse.  It  is  a  splendid  arrange- 
ment for  politicians,  but  of  small  advantage  to  becalmed  or  ship- 
wrecked sailors.  I  shaved,  however,  poured  sea-water  over  my  mal- 
treated body,  put  on  the  only  clothing  I  had  left  after  pitching  my 
rags  overboard,  and  presented  the  captain  with  the  old  felt  hat  that 
had  protected  me  from  the  sun  in  fourteen  countries.  This  last  act 
may  have  induced  his  ally,  the  wind,  to  waft  us  in  behind  the  break- 
water while  the  sun  was  still  above  the  horizon. 

However,  being  in  port  in  Venezuela  is  not  synonymous  with  going 
ashore.  Once  at  anchor,  almost  within  springing  distance  of  a  stone 
wharf,  I  had  to  wait  while  the  captain  went  to  report  my  existence 
and  set  in  motion  all  the  formalities,  including  the  payment  of  fees, 
that  were  required  exactly  as  if  I  had  been  landing  from  a  foreign 
country.  To  tell  the  truth,  no  sane  person  would  be  eager  to  get 
ashore  in  La  Guayra,  unless  it  was  in  the  hope  of  immediately  going 
elsewhere.  A  parched  and  thirsty  town,  in  spite  of  the  brilliant  blue 
sea  beating  at  its  feet,  with  rows  of  unattractive  houses,  all  alike 
except  in  slight  variations  of  color,  and  even  those  in  pastel  shades 
lacking  vividness,  strewn  irregularly,  singly,  in  groups,  and  in  one 
larger  mass,  up  dull-red  and  sand-colored  hills  which  piled  precip- 
itously into  the  sky,  it  plainly  had  little  attractiveness  except  as  a 
picturesque  ensemble  from  a  distance.  Trails  climbed  straight  up  this 
sheer  mountain-wall,  as  if  in  haste  to  escape  the  hot  and  ugly  town 
at  its  feet,  while  a  carriage-road  and  a  railway  set  out  more  decorously 
along  the  shore  for  the  same  destination, — Caracas. 

A  brass-tinted,  supercilious  official  with  a  prejudice  against  shaving, 
who  was  lolling  beneath  a  regal  awning,  had  himself  rowed  out  at  last 
to  ask  me  a  score  of  absurd  questions  and  set  my  answers  down  at 
length  in  a  book,  after  which  he  went  ashore  again  to  advise  the 
government  whether  or  not  I  should  be  granted  an  "order  of  dis- 
embarkment" — without  which  I  must  continue  to  sit  out  here  in  the 
blazing  sun  even  though  the  "Caracas  of  Wilmington,  Delaware,"  acrosi^ 
the  harbor  were  about  to  sail  and  I  eager  to  take  it.  By  and  by  a 
yellow  negro  rowed  out  to  ask  if  I  had  a  visiting-card  to  prove  my 
respectability,    saying   the   prcfectura    was    "making    some    question" 


THE  TRACKLESS  LLANOS  OF  VENEZUELA         641 

about  my  landing.  Another  hour  passed,  and  at  last  a  boat  was  sent 
to  take  me  ashore,  where  I  applied  at  once  to  the  collector  »jf  customs 
for  the  baggage  I  had  intrusted  to  the  purser  of  the  Dutch  boat  that 
had  dropped  me  at  Trinidad.  Luckily,  the  latter  had  carried  out 
instructions,  or  I  should  scarcely  have  dared  venture  up  to  Caracas. 
Meanwhile,  one  of  the  men  who  had  rowed  out  for  me  was  dogging  my 
footsteps  with  a  want-a-tip  air.  He  was,  it  turned  out,  collector  for 
the  corporacion,  the  foreign  company  that  built  the  docks  of  La 
Guayra,  and  which  exacts  forty  cents  for  every  passenger  who  lands — 
or  sixty,  if  he  comes  from  a  boat  not  tied  up  to  the  wharf.  But 
instead  of  collecting  it  in  an  office,  or  in  an  ofiicial  way,  he  followed 
me  about  like  a  bootblack  and  then  tried  to  squeeze  an  extra  "com- 
mission" out  of  me  on  the  ground  that  he  had  been  forced  to  follow 
me  about. 

This  "corporation,"  which  is  English,  holds  what  is  rated  "one  of 
the  finest  grafts"  in  South  America,  having  the  right  for  ninety-nine 
years  to  charge  for  every  person,  every  pound  of  merchandise,  every 
trunk,  valise,  and  even  handbag,  which  embarks  or  disembarks  in 
La  Guayra,  to  say  nothing  of  heavy  fees  for  every  ship  that  enters 
the  harbor.  Yet  so  overrun  is  it  said  to  be  with  native  employees 
forced  upon  it  by  politicians  that  the  "graft"  is  by  no  means  so 
splendid  as  it  sounds.  V^enezuela  is  notoriously  in  the  front  rank  of 
political  corruption  in  South  America,  and  La  Guayra  is  its  greatest 
single  fleecing-place.  From  the  instant  he  enters  this  chief  port  the 
stranger  is  hounded  at  every  turn  by  grasping,  insolent  officials  and 
political  favorites  permitted  to  indulge  in  the  most  absurd  extortions, 
a  spirit  which  pervades  the  entire  population  down  to  the  last  impu- 
dent, rascally  street-urchin.  Taxes,  dues  and  customs  duties  have 
frankly  been  made  not  only  as  high  and  onerous  but  as  complicated 
as  possible,  in  order  to  mulct  the  taxpayer  or  importer  to  the  advan- 
tage of  swarming  loafers  in  government  uniform.  A  most  intricate 
system  of  fines  and  penalties  is  imposed,  for  instance,  by  the  customs 
regulations,  for  the  slightest  errors  in  invoices.  The  collectors  receive 
meager  salaries,  but  the  discoverer  of  any  "violation"  of  the  elaborate 
statutes  pockets  one  half  the  fine  imposed,  with  the  result  that  there 
is  an  un-Venezuelan  zeal  in  looking  for  flaws,  and  fines  are  assessed 
even  for  the  omission  of  commas,  the  faulty  use  of  semicolons,  and 
for  abbreviations. 

One  can  scarcely  blame  a  man  forced  to  live  in  La  Guayra.  however. 
for  taking  it  out  on  his  fellow-man.     Piled  up  the  sheer,  arid  mountain- 


642  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  Px\Tx\GONIA 

wall  with  only  two  streets  on  the  level,  and  with  the  sun  baking  in 
upon  it  all  day,  it  feels  like  a  gigantic  oven ;  certainly  it  was  the  hottest 
place  I  had  ever  seen  in  South  America.  Nor  was  it  the  stirring, 
endurable  heat,  tempered  by  a  constant  breeze,  of  most  of  the  con- 
tinent, but  a  sweltering,  melting  temperature  that  not  only  left  me 
drenched  with  perspiration  within  a  minute  after  I  had  stepped  ashore, 
but  which  made  it  impossible  even  to  write  because  one's  hands  soaked 
the  paper,  which  set  one  to  dripping  before  he  sat  down  to  early 
morning  coffee.  Everyone  in  town  had  a  wilted,  unshaven,  downcast 
air,  as  if  hating  himself  and  the  world  at  large  for  his  uncomfortable 
existence.  To  add  to  my  disgust,  it  was  Friday,  and  the  penetrating 
stink  of  fish  pervaded  every  corner  of  the  organized  squalor,  pursuing 
me  even  into  the  highest  room  of  the  dirty  negro  pension  which  posed 
as  a  hotel.  The  only  endurable  place  in  town  was  a  little  piece  of 
park  and  promenade  along  the  edge  of  the  sea ;  but  the  bestial  habits 
of  the  populace  had  sullied  even  the  ocean  breezes. 

The  "Ferrocarril  La  Guaira  a  Caracas,"  built  in  1885  by  an  English 
company,  takes  twenty-four  miles  to  cover  an  actual  distance  of  about 
eight,  with  a  fare  of  ten  cents  a  mile  and  a  train  in  each  direction  twice 
a  day.  So  often  had  I  climbed  by  rail  abruptly  into  the  clouds  in 
South  America  that  this  was  no  new  experience.  Moreover,  the 
climb  is  much  less  lofty  than  several  others,  though  there  is  much 
the  same  sensation  as  one  goes  swiftly  up  from  sea-level  in  vast 
curves  around  the  reddish  desert  hills,  with  an  ever-opening  vista  of 
La  Guayra  and  its  adjacent  towns  along  the  scalloped  shore.  Then  the 
train  squirms  in  and  out  of  Andean  ranges,  at  times  utterly  barren,  at 
others  green,  past  dizzy  precipices  and  mighty  valleys,  the  stone-faced 
cart-load  climbing  in  vast  turns  in  the  same  general  direction.  At 
the  halfway  station  of  Zigzag  we  passed  the  down  train,  after  which 
we  rumbled  quite  a  while  across  a  plateau  country  among  mountain 
heights,  until  finally  there  burst  upon  me  the  last  South  American 
capital — striking,  but  not  to  be  compared  with  the  first  view  of 
several  others. 

Caracas  has  "some  11,000  houses  and  80,000  inhabitants,"  including 
its  suburbs,  partly  because  the  constant  revolutions  have  driven  the 
population  to  the  national  capital  for  protection.  A  tyrant  can  do 
things  out  on  the  lonely  llanos  which  he  would  not  dare  do  in  the 
shadow  of  his  own  palace.  Being  but  three  thousand  feet  above  sea- 
level,  it  lacks  many  of  the  unique  features  of  lofty  Bogota,  Quito, 
or  La  Paz;  yet  it  is  high  enough  to  have  a  cool  mountain  air  that 


THE  TRACKLESS  LLANOS  OF  VENEZUELA    647, 

quickly  fills  the  traveler  in  the  tropics  with  new  life.  Seated  in  a 
mountain  lap  twelve  miles  by  three  in  size,  the  Sierra  de  Avila  cuts 
it  off  from  the  sea  and  high  hills  enclose  it  on  all  sides.  The  site  is 
uneven,  especially  toward  the  range,  its  upper  part  covered  with 
forest,  over  which  climb  the  same  direct  trails  one  sees  scrambling 
up  the  far  more  precipitous  mountain  face  from  La  Guayra.  Here 
and  there  the  town  is  broken  up  by  qucbradas  and  several  small 
streams,  of  which  the  Guaire  is  almost  a  river;  yet  Caracas  in  its  lap 
of  green  hills  is  not  itself  hilly,  but  merely  undulating,  its  streets 
rolling  leisurely  away  across  town,  with  a  considerable  slope  from 
north  to  south,  so  that  every  shower  washes  the  city,  and  the  tropical 
deluges  to  which  it  is  sometimes  subject  make  rivers  of  the  north-and- 
south  streets.  The  \^enezuelan  capital  has  little  of  the  picturesqueness 
of  several  west-coast  capitals.  There  are  no  Indians  with  their 
distinctive  dress,  no  paganish  street-calls,  no  c|uaint  aboriginal  cus- 
toms. On  the  other  hand,  it  is  well  put  together,  with  good  pave- 
ments and  sidewalks,  instead  of  cobbled  roads  with  flagstones  down 
the  center,  and  has  a  more  up-to-date  air,  as  if  closer  in  touch  with 
the  world  than  the  loftier  cities  to  the  w-est,  and  it  is  at  least  a  pretty 
city  from  whatever  hillside  one  looks  down  upon  it. 

The  houses  are  wrong  side  out,  of  course,  after  the  Aloorish- 
Spanish  fashion,  the  streets  faced  by  ugly  bare  walls,  with  the  flowery 
gardens  and  the  pretty  girls  within.  It  has  by  no  means  so  many 
churches  per  capita  as  some  of  its  neighbors,  though  many  priests  are 
to  be  seen,  sometimes  standing  on  the  corners  smoking  cigarettes  and 
"talking  girls"  with  their  layman  fellow-sports.  The  cathedral  houses 
a  fine  painting,  unusual  in  South  American  churches,  an  enormous 
"Last  Supper"  by  a  Venezuelan  who  died  while  engaged  upon  it,  so 
that  portions  are  merely  sketched.  Beside  the  National  Theater  there 
is  a  bronze  statue  of  Washington,  erected  during  the  centenary  of 
Bolivar  in  1883.  He  has  no  cause  to  feel  lonel}'.  even  so  far  from 
home,  for  Caracas  swarms  with  national  heroes — in  statues,  the  only 
muscular,  full-chested  men  in  town,  unless  one  be  misled  by  the 
splendid  tailor-made  shoulders  in  the  plazas  and  paseos.  No  other 
city  of  its  size,  evidently,  was  the  birthplace  of  so  many  great  men. 
Nearly  every  other  house  bears  a  tablet  announcing  it  as  the  scene 
of  the  first  squall  of  "Generalisimo"  Fulano  or  of  "the  great  genius" 
Solano.  Not  all  of  these,  however,  are  mere  local  celebrities ;  two 
simple  old  houses  bear  the  tablets  of  Andres  Bello,  the  grammarian. 


644  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

whose  fame  reached  to  Chile  and  to  Spain,  and  of  Simon  Bohvar, 
"the  Liberator." 

Somehow,   when  one   has   been  out  of  it   for   a  time,   the   Latin- 
American  atmosphere  is  almost  pleasing — when  one  is  in  a  mood  for 
it.     Here    I    found    myself    enjoying   again   the    hoarse    screams    t)f 
lottery-ticket  vendors,  the  cries  of  milk-dealers  on  horseback,  their 
cans  dangling  beneath  their  legs,  the  bread-man  with  his  red,  white 
and  blue  barrel  on  either  side  of  the  horse  he  rides,  the  countless  little 
shops  where  refugees,  huddling  under  the  protection  of  the  capital, 
strive  to  make  both  ends  meet  by  trying  to  sell  something,  content  at 
least  to  be  no  longer  at  the  mercy  of  government  as  well  as  revolu- 
tionists out  on  the  little  farms  that  have  long  since  gone  back  to  jungle. 
Caracas  rises  and  begins  business  later  than  La  Guayra,  where  the 
heat  of  noonday  makes  a  siesta  imperative;  it  is  a  bit  less  foppish 
than  Bogota  or  Quito,  perhaps  because  of  its  greater  proximity  to 
the  world.     Here,  too,  are  ragged  men  and  boys  who  soften  their 
incessant  appeals  by  using  a  diminutive  "Tiene  usted  un  fosforito?" 
"Dame    un   centavito,    caballero?"    "Regalame    un   regalito,    quiere?" 
It  is  easier  to  comply  now  and  then  with  such  requests  in  a  city  where 
prices  have  not  leaped  skyward,  as  in  most  of  the  world.     At  the 
"Hotel  Filadelfia"   my   room   and   food   cost   four   holivares    (almost 
eighty  cents)  a  day.     True,  I  found  my  hammock  more  comfortable 
than  the  bed,  though  the  nights  were  somewhat  chilly  in  it;  and  the 
impudence,  indolence,  and  indifference  of  the  caraqueilo   servant  is 
notorious.     Ask   anyone,    from    manager    to   the    kitchen-boy,    to    do 
something,  and  the  reply  was  almost  certain  to  be  a  sullen,  "That's 
not  my  work,"  nor  would  they  ever  deign  to  pass  the  word  on  to 
whosoever  work  it  was.     Evidently  they  belonged  to  a  union.     As  in 
Ecuador,  hotel  guests  were   forbidden  to  talk  politics. 

Some  of  the  principal  streets  were  lined  with  gambling  houses  of 
all  classes,  from  two-cent-ante  workmen's  places  to  sumptuous  parlors 
with  pianos  playing  and  the  doors  wide  open  to  all,  even  to  a  penurious 
"gringo"  who  came  only  to  watch  the  heavy-eyed  croupiers  and  the 
other  curious  night  types  who  make  their  living  by  coin  manipulation. 
Though  "the  cheapest  thing  in  Caracas  is  women,"  they  are  seldom 
seen  on  the  streets.  Illegitimacy,  like  illiteracy,  is  more  prevalent  than 
its  opposite,  but  it  is  not  the  Spanish-American  way  to  flaunt  social 
vices.  American  influence  is  more  in  evidence  than  in  any  other 
South  American  country;  Caracas  is  the  only  city  on  that  continent 
where  I  saw  native  boys  playing  baseball.     Germans  control  much  of 


THE  TRACKLESS  LLANOS  OF  VENEZUELA         645 

the  commerce  and  the  longest  railway  in  the  country,  from  Caracas 
to  Puerto  Cabello,  but  with  these  exceptions  the  English  hold  most  large 
enterprises,  including  electric-lights,  telephones,  and  street-cars,  and 
are  reputed  to  be  clever  in  keeping  out  American  competition. 

Like  Santiago  de  Chile,  Caracas  has  a  limited  number  of  "best 
families,"  who  form  the  "aristocracy"  and  to  some  extent  an  oligarchy, 
though  intermarriage  has  produced  among  them  some  of  the  ills  of 
European  royalty.  There  are  good-looking,  not  a  few  pretty,  and 
even  occasionally  beautiful  women  in  this  class,  though  the  casual 
visitor  sees  them  only  behind  the  bars  of  their  windows  or  promenad- 
ing in  carriages  and  automobiles  around  El  Paraiso  across  the  Guaire 
on  Sunday  afternoons,  and  at  the  evening  band  concerts  in  the  Plaza 
Bolivar.  On  the  whole,  this  so-called  higher  class  is  more  corrupt 
and  worthless  than  the  workers,  especially  those  of  the  llanos,  who 
at  least  are  laborious  and  long-suffering,  even  though  ignorant,  super- 
stitious, and  often  victims  of  the  same  erotic  influences  as  the  rich  and 
educated.  It  is  natural  that  the  political  power  in  Venezuela  should 
have  been  wrested  from  this  weak  "aristocracy"  by  hardier  types  from 
the  interior. 

The  most  notorious  of  these,  the  chief  founder  of  that  miUtary 
dictatorship  which  to  this  day  holds  Venezuela  in  a  tighter  grip  than 
any  other  country  in  South  America,  was  Castro.  Charles  II  of 
England  would  have  felt  at  home  with  this  fallen  tyrant,  a  degenerate 
who  made  use  of  his  power  and  government  riches  to  corrupt  the 
maidenhood  of  his  native  land.  His  subordinates,  especially  the 
governor  of  the  federal  district,  were  chosen  less  for  their  ability 
as  rulers  than  for  their  success  in  coaxing  young  girls  to  visit  the 
tyrant  in  a  house  across  the  Guaire,  where  he  carried  on  his  amours 
almost  publicly.  In  those  days  Caracas  was  overrun  with  saucy  little 
presidential  mistresses  in  short  skirts.  Force,  or  anything  else  likely 
to  lead  to  public  scandal,  however,  was  not  included  among  Castro's 
amorous  weapons — for  there  was  a  Senora  Castro  before  whose  wrath 
the  highest  authorities  of  Venezuela  were  w'ont  to  flee  in  dismay. 
The  terror  which  Castro  himself  still  evokes  among  the  masses  of  the 
country  is  such  that  his  name  to  this  day  is  almost  never  openly  spoken. 
In  Ciudad  Bolivar  I  sat  one  evening,  reading  an  exaggerated  tale  of 
the  tyrant's  lust,  a  book  proscribed  in  Venezuela  but  stacked  up  in  the 
book-stores  of  Trinidad,  when  the  hotel-keeper  paused  to  ask  in  a 
trembling  voice  how  I  dared  have  such  a  volume  in  my  possession. 

"Why  not?"  I  asked. 


646  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

"Ah,  it  is  true,"  he  answered,  turning  away,  "in  the  great  United 
States  there  are  no  tyrants  to  make  a  man  fear  his  own  shadow." 

Aside  from  his  patent  fauUs,  however,  Castro  was  a  man  of  strength 
and  native  abihty ;  though  this  was  offset  by  his  provincial  ignorance, 
a  misconception  of  the  unknown  outside  world  which  led  him  to 
believe  he  could  easily  thrash  England,  France  and  Germany  com- 
bined, so  that  he  took  pains  to  alienate  foreign  governments.  It  is 
an  error  into  which  his  successor  has  been  careful  not  to  fall. 

General  Juan  Vicente  Gomez  is  an  andino,  like  Castro — that  is, 
a  man  from  the  mountainous  part  of  the  country  near  the  Colombian 
border,  with  considerable  Indian  blood  and  a  primitive  force  that 
overwhelms  the  soft-handed  "aristocracy"  of  Caracas  which  once  ruled 
the  country.  Like  Castro,  he  is  ignorant,  strong,  coarse,  and  shrewd 
— fond  of  young  women,  too,  though  with  strength  enough  to  put  them 
into  the  background  when  they  interfere  with  more  important  matters. 
Years  ago  he  mortgaged  his  property  to  help  Castro,  but  the  latter 
treated  him  like  a  peon,  even  after  appointing  him  vice-president. 
Gomez,  however,  knew  how  to  bide  his  time.  By  1908  his  dissipa- 
tions had  left  Castro  no  choice  but  to  go  to  the  German  baths  or  die, 
and  he  delegated  his  power  to  the  obsequious  vice-president  and  went. 
A  few  days  later  Gomez  set  out  at  four  in  the  morning  for  a  round 
of  the  military'  barracks,  called  out  the  commanders,  thrust  a  revolver 
into  their  ribs,  and  requested  •  them  henceforth  to  bear  in  mind  that 
he  was  president  of  Venezuela.  This  was  his  first  "election."  During 
his  seven-year  term  he  brought  about  some  improvements,  particularly 
in  roads  and  the  army,  not  to  mention  acquiring  immense  properties, 
while  the  exiled  Castro  was  losing  his  to  former  victims  who  were 
suing  him  in  the  Venezuelan  courts.  The  constitution  stated  that  a 
president  could  not  be  elected  to  succeed  himself.  Toward  the  end 
of  his  term,  therefore,  Gomez  nominally  resigned,  put  in  a  temporary 
figurehead,  and  had  congress  "elect"  him  again.  At  the  same  time 
he  had  a  new  constitution  made  in  which  there  is  no  mention  of 
reelections,  with  the  understanding  that  it  was  to  come  into  force 
when  he  took  the  oath  of  office. 

This  he  was  to  have  done  some  months  before,  but,  being  a  cautious 
man,  as  well  as  preferring  country  life,  "the  elect" — never  did  I  meet 
a  Venezuelan  who  dared  mention  him  directly  by  name — remained 
on  his  own  ranches  in  Maracay,  a  hundred  miles  out  along  the  German 
railway,  leaving  one  of  the  minor  palaces  occupied  by  a  tool  called 
"provisional  president."    Castro  himself,  however,  never  attained  such 


THE  TRACKLESS  LLANOS  OF  VENEZUELA  647 

absolute  power  as  the  new  tyrant,  who  puts  recalcitrant  congressmen 
in  jail,  personally  appoints  state,  municij^al,  and  rural  authorities,  and 
in  general  smiles  benignly  upon  the  helpless  constitution.  Not  the 
least  amusing  contrasts  in  Venezuela  were  the  private  opinions  of  its 
chief  newspaper  editors  and  the  slavish  attitude  of  the  sheets  them- 
selves, the  entire  front  pages  of  which  were  taken  up  day  after  day 
with  photographs  of  the  "President-Elect  of  the  Republic  and  Com- 
mander-in-Chief of  the  Army"  in  this  or  that  daily  occupation, 
followed,  to  the  total  exclusion  of  any  real  news,  by  obsequious 
telegrams  from  his  henchmen  in  all  parts  of  the  country,  from  mis- 
informed foreigners  or  foreign  governments,  often  from  imaginary 
sources,  congratulating  him  and  his  countrymen  that  "the  greatest 
man  of  the  century  has  again  been  chosen  as  their  leader  by  the  great 
and  free  Venezuelan  people."  Even  over-altruistic  or  subsidized 
American  periodicals  with  a  South  American  circulation  frequently 
hold  up  the  present  tyrant  of  Venezuela  as  an  example  of  the  pro- 
gressive constitutional  ruler.  Many  of  the  best  people  of  that  country 
would  prefer  even  American  intervention  to  the  illiterate  tyranny 
which  makes  it  dangerous  to  speak  their  real  thoughts  above  a 
whisper ;  but  there  is  a  strict  censorship,  and  Gomez,  wiser  than 
Castro,  professes  great  friendship  for  all  great  foreign  powers,  par- 
ticularly the  overshadowing  "Colossus  of  the  North." 

In  the  long  run  a  people  probably  gets  about  as  good  a  government 
as  it  deserves,  and  a  stern  dictator,  on  the  style  of  Diaz  of  Mexico, 
is  perhaps  the  ruler  best  suited  to  Venezuela.  But  from  our  more 
enlightened  point  of  view  such  rule  would  not  seem  to  promise  social 
improvement.  The  country  is  bled  white  to  keep  up  the  army  and 
several  other  presidential  hobbies,  to  the  exclusion  of  schools  and 
other  forms  of  progress.  Every  cigarette-paper  bears  a  printed  govern- 
ment stamp  alleging  that  it  pays  duty  in  benefit  of  "Instruccion 
Publica,"  a  source  yielding  more  than  a  million  dollars  a  year;  yet 
it  is  years  since  the  students  of  the  Lhiiversity  of  Caracas  struck 
because  Gomez  spent  the  legal  income  of  the  schools  on  the  army,  and 
at  last  accounts  it  had  not  yet  been  reopened.  The  dictator  himself 
can  read,  but  not  write,  except  to  sign  his  name.  Every  morning  at 
four  he  was  at  his  desk  in  Maracay,  the  business  of  the  day  laid  out 
before  him, — tirst  his  private  affairs,  next  his  hobby,  the  army,  then 
politics  and  the  country  in  general.  According  to  a  genuine  authority 
on  the  subject,  he  laboriously  spells  out  all  the  correspondence  him- 
self, then  calls  in  a  shrewd  and  trusted  uncle,  a  man  too  old  to  have 


648  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

ambitions  to  succeed  him,  and  together  they  concoct  the  repHes.  The 
present  government  of  Venezuela  is  truly  a  family  government. 
General  Jose  Vicente  Gomez,  the  son  whom  the  dictator  is  evidently 
grooming  to  be  his  ultimate  successor,  is  Inspector  General  of  the 
Army;  General  Juan  Gomez  is  governor  of  the  federal  district; 
Colonel  All  Gomez  is  second  vice-president ;  two  other  sons  are  presi- 
dents of  states — the  dictator,  by  the  way,  is  a  bachelor — and  so  on 
through  the  family.  Like  many  another  Venezuelan  of  numerous 
descendants,  "the  elect"  never  married;  but  of  his  scores  of  children 
by  many  different  women  he  has  legitimized  the  few  most  promising 
and  lifted  them  to  his  own  level — a  practical,  man-governed  form  of 
survival  of  the  fittest. 

With  the  white  mists  still  clinging  to  Caracas  and  its  sierra,  I 
strolled  out  one  morning  along  the  "Highway  of  the  West"  through 
the  flat,  rich  vega  to  Dos  Caminos  and  Antimano,  where  the  German 
railway  breaks  out  of  the  lap  of  hills  and  squirms  away  to  Valencia 
and  Puerto  Cabello.  A  private  way  through  deep  woods  with  coffee 
bushes  brought  me  to  the  little  country  home  of  Manuel  Diaz  Rodri- 
guez, and  at  the  same  time  reminded  me  that  all  is  not  tyranny,  sloth, 
and  hopelessness  in  the  mistreated  Land  of  the  Orinoco.  For  here, 
amid  stretches  of  light-green  sugar-cane  that  seems  destined  ultimately 
to  bring  material  prosperity  to  the  country,  lives  one  of  South  America's 
greatest  contributors  to  modern  Spanish  literature. 

I  had  planned  to  say  farewell  to  South  America  by  walking  up 
through  the  "Puerta  de  Caracas"  and  over  the  mountain  range  to 
La  Guayra.  But  on  the  last  evening  a  tropical  deluge  roared  down 
upon  the  capital,  and  I  dared  not  tempt  fate  to  prevent  me  from 
reaching  home  within  four  years  of  my  departure  on  my  Latin- 
American  pilgrimage.  The  last  day  of  August  dawned  brilliant  and 
cool.  In  my  pocket  was  a  ticket  to  Broadway  and  just  enough  ragged 
Venezuelan  money  to  carry  me  down  the  mountain  and  through  the 
swarming  grafters  of  La  Guayra  to  the  steamer.  Cheery  with  the 
thought  of  home-coming,  I  lugged  my  own  baggage — to  the  disdainful 
astonishment  of  the  Venezuelan  crowd — out  onto  the  platform  and 
stowed  it  away  under  a  second-class  bench.  I  had  no  sooner  stepped 
back  into  the  waiting-room,  however,  than  a  gaunt  and  coppery 
caraqueno  slowly  mounted  a  chair  in  front  of  a  blackboard  over  the 
ticket-office,  and  with  nerve-racking  deliberation  began  to  write,  in 
a  schoolboy  hand  which  required  some  ten  seconds  for  each  stroke 
and  fully  fifteen  minutes  for  the  entire  announcement: 


Tlir:  TRACKLESS  LLANOS  OF  \'EXEZUELA  649 

NOTICE 
On     account     of     landslides      there      will 
be     no     ni  o  r  n  i  n  j:^     train.       Notice     will     be 
given    if    the    afternoon    train    descends. 

I  had  felt  it  in  my  bones !  Fate  did  not  purpose  that  I  should  ever 
escape  from  this  unattractive  continent!  This  was  the  first  train 
that  had  failed  to  run  in  eight  months,  and  of  course  it  must  be  the 
very  one  I  had  depended  on  to  get  me  down  in  time  for  the  steamer. 
It  was  too  late  to  walk — and  with  my  baggage  I  could  not  run. 
Automobiles,  quick  to  scent  trouble,  were  already  raising  their  price 
for  the  trip  from  $20  to  $30  and  $40.  At  last  I  found  a  Ford  that 
would  carry  me  and  two  other  Americans  down  for  a  hundred 
hoUvares — which  was  about  ninety  more  than  we  owned  among  us. 
But  by  some  stroke  of  fortune  a  thoroughly  human  minister  had  been 
accredited  to  Caracas  by  our  enigmatical  State  Department.  I  regret 
to  report  that  we  routed  him  out  of  bed,  and  ten  minutes  later  were 
dashing  full-tilt  along  the  pool-filled  and  broken  highway  to  the  coast. 
On  the  outskirts  of  the  capital  there  were  innumerable  lethargic 
donkey  trains  to  dodge  and  pass.  Then  we  were  twistmg  and  turning 
along  the  mountain  road,  with  thousands  of  feet  of  loose  shale  piled 
sheer  above  and  sudden  death  falling  away  directly  below  us.  The 
heavy  rain  had  brought  down  rocks  larger  than  dog-kennels,  and  in 
places  had  heaped  up  loose  stones  and  earth  until  the  road  was 
practically  blocked.  At  one  such  spot  a  big,  aristocratic  automobile 
stood  eyeing  in  despair  a  sharp  V-shaped  turn  it  could  not  make. 
Our  unpretentious  conveyance  scampered  up  on  the  slide,  slipped 
to  the  very  edge  of  the  deadly  abyss,  then  climbed  down  upon  solid 
road  again  and  sped  on.  Higher  and  higher  climbed  the  serpentine 
carrctera,  constantly  whirling  around  turns  where  the  slightest  slip 
of  the  mechanism  or  of  the  doubtful  nerves  of  our  very  Venezuelan 
chauffeur  would  have  ended  our  journeyings  for  all  time,  tearing 
blindly  around  sharp-angled  curves  with  a  bare  six  inches  between  us 
and  instant  death,  and  that  six  inches  likel}-  to  be  treacherous  sliding 
shale.  Far  up  among  the  reddish  barren  hills  we  passed  the  summit, 
then  began  to  descend  by  the  same  perilous  highway,  where  we  seemed 
ever  and  anon  to  be  riding  off  into  the  bluish  void  of  infinity,  suddenly 
coming  cut  on  a  view  of  the  coast  and  indigo  sea  far  below  us,  and 
for  a  long  time  thereafter  winding  and  twisting  incessantly  down- 
ward,  with   no  certainty   that   all   our   efforts  had   not  been   in   vain. 


650  WORKING  NORTH  FROM  PATAGONIA 

Then  all  at  once  La  Guayra  appeared,  and  out  along  the  breakwater 
still  lay  the  steamer,  tiny  as  a  rowboat  from  this  height,  but  plainly 
in  no  mood  to  move  until  we  had  time  to  comply  with  the  irksome 
Venezuelan  formalities  and  scramble  on  board.  But  it  was  a  painful 
anticlimax  to  the  life  I  had  led  in  South  America  to  be  rescued  at 
the  last  by  a  Ford! 

Of  several  hours'  struggle  with  swarming  official  and  unofficial 
grafters,  with  strutting  negroes  in  uniform  and  "generals"  who  signed 
with  the  only  word  they  could  write  my  permission  to  depart  from 
their  fetid  land,  of  the  final  cupidities  of  the  "corporation,"  I  will  say 
nothing,  lest  I  again  be  betrayed  into  language  unbefitting  a  homeward 
journey.  Suffice  it  that  at  last  I  clambered  dripping  wet  up  the  gang- 
way, at  the  foot  of  which  an  ill-bred  youth  in  a  Venezuelan  uniforifl 
snatched  the  "permission  to  embark"  in  pursuit  of  which  I  had  spent 
perspiring  hours,  and  soon  black  night  had  blotted  out  from  my  sight 
the  variegated  but  not  soon  to  be  forgotten  continent  of  South  America 


THE  END 


UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 


AA    000  784  282    6 


University  of  California 

30^  rS^M  "^"n  "^^'°^'^'-  LIBRARY  FACILITY 
305  De  Neve  Drive  -  Parking  Lot  17  .  Box  951388 
LOS  ANGELES,  CALIFORNIA  90095  ISsf 


RECD  YRi 


2005 


